Paul Garner on Long Covid and ME/CFS - BMJ articles and other media.

Whenever I read anything about the BPS fanatics I remind myself that psychiatrists must have been threatened for generations by those who are severely mentally ill, and they accepted it as part of the job.

But people with ME (and Long Covid?) are practically treated like terrorists for writing or answering a tweet?
 
Possibly there's a better place to post this article, but it won't hurt here:

Long Covid Advocacy blog on dualism and why Paul Garner goes on about it:
So why is he doing this? One answer is that it's prime dead cat, red herring, straw person territory all hanging out in the back alley. Instead of talking about the medical harm that people with Long Covid and ME experience we now have to talk about fucking dualism. It’s essentially a way to sound clever and to give your opponent a hard time in trying to respond. Let’s talk about monocytes? But what about your will to power - shouts your Nietzschian Dr, use that on your immune system!
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How do we give people with ME and Long Covid a Good Life? If Plato met Paul in the agora maybe this is what his main concern would be? Even without a cure this can be done through social care, occupational care, help with benefits, hell even a ready made frozen freezer of food and a cleaner. To be completely honest these folk shouting from their parapet of anti-dualism would be of much greater use if they went and cleaned the oven for someone with ME/LC.
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What we see is a radicalisation process happening to some in medicine. Where a certain group have adopted radical views in opposition to the experience of a vast swath of society - that they can’t be dissuaded of. So much for methodological doubt - another thing for the Descartian trash bin. It works like a cult. It is a membership of a belief system that has no grounding in reality, in patients' lives. If as a medic you can’t listen to a tsunami of patients telling you that these approaches don’t work and are harmful - something has gone very wrong. It’s essentially disinformation.
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It works like a cult.

That's because it is a cult. Just another version of the oldest and most destructive cult of all. The mind over matter, spirit over flesh cult. All the authoritative pseudo-scientific jargon accompanying this modern version doesn't make it any more real. Just more insidious and pernicious.
 
Sean said:
It works like a cult.

That's because it is a cult. Just another version of the oldest and most destructive cult of all. The mind over matter, spirit over flesh cult. All the authoritative pseudo-scientific jargon accompanying this modern version doesn't make it any more real. Just more insidious and pernicious.
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Worse than a cult because it works on targeting the supporters of the vulnerable to convince them their loved ones are 'pests' who are dragging them 'into the pit' and that they are ill 'because they don't choose the life they love'. Or in various other variations disregarding who they are as the propaganda these people sell is to have contempt for what the pwme is stuck with suffering from.

I mean there are maybe a few cults where it gets the family members to join and then to reject and hate their whatever relative and outcast or hurt them but it is pretty unusual in advertising techniques that seem to be about focusing not directly on the vulnerable but encouraging maltreatment ie behavioural 'psychology' to encourage them to 'hand over their vulnerable' 'to be sorted'.

Cults used to have family members trying to rescue their loved ones from their brainwashing, whereas this 'orrible scenario has actively sought to separate and blame and make having a relationship dependent on someone both being able to fake it and not getting worse, which is of course impossible given they have a condition so they've actively created a situation of abuse.
 
Esther12 said:
The Kelland pieces had significant influence, but well before that just the tone of some criticism encourages other academics to be 'loyal' to their colleagues, want to avoid adding to their burden, etc. They also mean that any criticism that is unfair and unreasonable is viewed as part of a wider problem. There are so many ways it's counter-productive. These sorts of things shouldn't really matter, but they do.
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You might want to look up Kelland properly, and her 'niche' type of writing and who she has written 'in support of' in similar ways. I highly doubt what she decided to do with that piece/the reason she was hired to do that piece was anything to do with any pwme or anything that actually happened from them. To infer such without noting that context is to me to be a bad bystander by jumping, as ordered, to find the 'why did they deserve it' in the victim without looking into the history of the perpetrator first. Which of course is what the writer is basically looking to incite.
 
Long Covid Advocacy reporting on Twitter Garner promoting psuedoscience

"Paul flies further down the misinformation rabbit hole In case anyone is wondering please stay away from Living Proof. They occupy a strange corner of twitter that unfortunately includes Long Covid Drs & researchers including Deepak Ravindran (SOS advisor) #disinformation"

https://twitter.com/user/status/1721091929310453779
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Jonathan Edwards said:
Paul Garner seems to have gone the full distance into quackery.
Even some of the other BPS people ought to find this embarrassing.
How you square this with supposedly academic critique of NICE guidelines beats me.
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I think they will be embarrassed that he hasn’t been bothering to NHS ify the lingo. He’s failed to muddy the waters he’s let off the foghorn instead of the dog whistle.

But having said that this exactly what many drs and researchers say and think about our predicament. It’s just their language choices are a little more more corporate psychology/health industry pseudoscience and a little less join my new religious/psychotherapy movement.
 
From the group:

*Medical disclaimer: The facilitators of the Mindbuddy groups are not medically trained, and information from this course should not be taken as formal medical advice. The neuroplastic approach is not intended to treat recognised conditions that have clear diagnostic tests, such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart conditions, organ damage or failure, rheumatoid arthritis, cancers, or infections.

So MS, RA et pain is real but if there is no biomarker then it's not real and all in your mind.

They're asking for donations. Why hasn't their hustle paid off yet?
 
Mij said:
From the group:

*Medical disclaimer: The facilitators of the Mindbuddy groups are not medically trained, and information from this course should not be taken as formal medical advice. The neuroplastic approach is not intended to treat recognised conditions that have clear diagnostic tests, such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart conditions, organ damage or failure, rheumatoid arthritis, cancers, or infections.

So MS, RA et pain is real but if there is no biomarker then it's not real and all in your mind.

They're asking for donations. Why hasn't their hustle paid off yet?
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As soon as a biomarker is found for a condition for some strange reason their treatment suddenly stops working
 
Mij said:
The neuroplastic approach is not intended to treat recognised conditions that have clear diagnostic tests, such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart conditions, organ damage or failure, rheumatoid arthritis, cancers, or infections.
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ok so from the tweet 'the pain is real but the body is not damaged'.

But the approach not intended to treat conditions where there is a test t show that the body IS damaged.

So we are back to the idea that if the basic tests dont show damage that must mean there isnt any. So its not possible for there to be damage that we dont have knowledge or methods to test for. Hubris.
Or even that we do have knowledge & tests to identify but we dont bother to run them because we only do basic testing if nothing shows up on the basics then clearly the body is not damaged and we can proceed with our approach.

Because obviously nobody has anything rare. Ever. We can assumed that rare = doesnt exist so not worth looking into or learning about, or, God fobid, testing for.

I often wonder whether so called 'rare' conditions would seem a lot more common if they were tested for more often.
 
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