Open letter to TEDxBristol regarding Esther Crawley's presentation on 2 November 2017

Exactly - who did the children inherit it from? other children? It is non sense.
Compared to what in adults?
First second or third infection? from when? birth? isnt that quite a wide variation anyway?
Does she have published stats to back these comments up or is it anecdotal?

Im asking these questions in the spirit of constructive, rather than personal criticism of Dr Crawley.

 

My experience as a mother of 2 girls is that they had oodles of snotty infections as soon as they started mixing with other kids at nursery and then school. I suspect most (if not all!) other mothers have similar experience. My girls now do with their kids. If she's talking of more serious infections (measles, mumps, chicken pox or similar) she's being very vague. Not a good look for a TED talk I would have thought?

 

I'm starting to get the impression that TEDx talks are the waste bin for attention-seekers impressed by their own babble. It looks like hosting pseudoscience or outright woo is a fairly routine occurrence for TEDx, as well as censoring criticisms of dodgy content.

 

If you ever listen to Ted talks on youtube and you have it set to autoplay its not long before you get one "modern women" usually American, after another coming on to tell us all how they are masturbation coaches, usually for their friends etc before they decided to turn their skill into a business. They usually go on to tell the audience how enlightened they are themselves about such issues and how repressed everyone else is.

No doubt because other people don't care to hear their nonsense they interpret this as a sign of repression.

Despite their stage presentations I always picture such people going home and crying into endless glasses of wine at night when they drop the facade of their amazing lives and face up to their own realities when they have no audience.

That's what I think of when I think of Ted talks and why I have never taken them seriously.

 

Well there is a movie where Ted talks.

 

Your post made me want to respond with ECs head photoshopped onto the poster for Inception

 

I would love to down-vote this talk if someone will be kind enough to tell me how to do it. I looked and couldn't see any link that would work. Real dunce here on social media and youtube!

 

I recommend pausing playback periodically and hollering at the screen for as long as necessary, preferably with plenty of Saxon for good measure!

 

Copy and then paste this link to use it to get to the video on YouTube

Code:

https://youtu.be/z0ORJdyR6_E

And then look for the thumb down.

 

I left a comment on the Tedx Facebook page

 

Thank you, @Andy! And @Adam pwme ! Sometimes my idiocy astounds me, though I've been using computers since mid-1980s and younger family members consider me something of a geek.

 

I think it has its basis in the school study. As usual it conflates chronic fatigue with CFS/ME.
Colby and Dowsett did a study re school illness in 1990s which may be more accurate.
Higher numbers will justify the need for more research

 

I screenshotted the first comment on the post Yesterday, must have already been deleted when the others in this thread were captured.

 

Click the cog icon, and change the speed to '2'. It makes the talk just as informative, but lasts half the time.

Alternative is to eat a spoon of pudding everytime she says 'We' but means 'I'. I know you like pudding, and this generates a lot of pudding eating.

 

Oh and double spoonfuls for each time she refers to herself as a "grownup".

 

I noticed that - weird.

 

I noticed as well but i didn't pay attention to it
If we were taking shots instead of eating pudding we would probably all die from alcohol poisoning, a cure of sorts i suppose

 

Coyne appears to like the letter.

https://jcoynester.wordpress.com/20...leys-disrupting-your-view-of-me-presentation/

 

I'm not at all in favour of EC's flawed research, nor her approach to patients, but in the interests of fairness and balance, especially for anyone who doesn't watch the video, EC does also make some valid points in the talk, eg,

- More research is needed
- More funding for research is needed
- If patients are trying something and saying it helps, research is needed to see whether that is true or not
- Children with ME/CFS don't have a choice about it (not sure how she squares that with finding the LP effective)

However, one swallow does not a summer make.

(Kinda glad that there isn't a dislike button as I think I might acquire a few here )

 

What she actually means though

"I need to do more research into chronic fatigue but call it chronic fatigue syndrome."

"More funding of MY research is needed."

"But lets ignore this idea when patients say the GET & CBT doesn't help and that pacing does help. Only I know what my patients need."

To be fair I don't understand the context here so I'm not going to use my crystal ball to reveal Esther's thoughts on this bit.

In seriousness, those are valid points but we know she doesn't mean them, not at least how they come across at face value.