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

Garner has backed himself into a corner by being so frequently public in his pronouncements on the media and social media and by adding himself as a signatory on BPS so called research and reviews.

He has made it his retirement project, with a new set of friends and colleagues, including leading the COFFI patient advisory group, helping to steer COFFI further into the LP, brain training fringes from the old standard CBT/GET.

If he does ever wake up from what I interpret as brainwashing he has willingly embraced, I imagine it will be mind shattering for him. Just the sheer embarrassment at having allowed oneself, a former esteemed professor of infectious diseases and evidence based medicine expert, to have gone off into the wilds of Alt Med.

I hope he does come to his senses and use his remaining years to try to reverse the harm he is doing.
 
Trish said:
Garner has backed himself into a corner by being so frequently public in his pronouncements on the media and social media and by adding himself as a signatory on BPS so called research and reviews.
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I think this is a strategy the LP-coaches consciously and actively use to "lock in" the LP training, by making people go public about it and claim to be healed. It's difficult to admit publicly that you were wrong and perhaps drew conclusions to hastily. And it's perhaps especially hard admitting it when you've received a lot of backlash from saying it in the first place.

So I think in a sense making people go public with it (aside from the marketing aspect), is about solidifying these new beliefs and this new approach to the disease in the person's own mind. To make sure they don't ditch the whole belief system, when they experience moments of doubt. As you do quite often when you try to train yourself to believe the LP principles, as frankly they don't really make sense or square well with the lived experience of having ME.
 
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If anyone, including Paul Garner, is reading this thread and wants to know more about LP, its methods, and the 'brainwashing' aspects, and harm it can do, I suggest reading these stories written by people who underwent LP.
https://lp-fortellinger.no/en/lp-stories/
If you don't have the energy to read them all, I have, and this is the notes I made after reading them:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/lp-fo...s-now-available-in-english.24653/#post-411641
There's more discussion of LP on that thread.
 
Campanula said:
I think this is a strategy the LP-coaches consciously and actively use to "lock in" the LP training, by making people go public about it and claim to be healed. It's difficult to admit publicly that you were wrong and perhaps drew conclusions to hastily. And it's perhaps especially hard admitting it when you've received a lot of backlash from saying it in the first place.

So I think in a sense making people go public with it (aside from the marketing aspect), is about solidifying these new beliefs and this new approach to the disease in the person's own mind. To make sure they don't ditch the whole belief system, when they experience moments of doubt. As you do quite often when you try to train yourself to believe the LP principles, as frankly they don't really make sense or square well with the lived experience of having ME.
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It is the basic technique of con artists and cults. Find a vulnerable mark, convince them you have the answers to their problems (real or imagined), get them to commit to something foolish and renounce their previous beliefs and relationships, and all as publicly and fervently as possible. Whip them into an evangelical mode.

Then they are trapped. They cannot back down and admit serious error without a huge loss of face and credibility. Especially if their previous position was as a genuine technical expert.
 
He will never verbalise that he has doubts or was wrong! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

LP, MLM, Cults all follow this pattern of making you “manifest” that all is fine, great in fact. Anyone who doesn’t agree is a suppressive person/bad influence.
 
Sean said:
Then they are trapped. They cannot back down and admit serious error without a huge loss of face and credibility. Especially if their previous position was as a genuine technical expert.
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This might seem strange to a lot of people here, but as annoying as these LP/BPS-pushers are, I also kind of feel for sorry them. Live Landmark once asked me to write a post about how much LP had helped me, I willingly complied and she shared it in an LP group. Maybe I could have been made to go out in the media myself, back when I was a "believer", if she was more insistent on me being more public about it. She can be very, very persuasive, and when you are trained in LP you are told you have to put all your scepticism aside and believe in it and your coaches with all your might. That is how you recover, according to them. This puts you into a very suggestible mode and makes it very easy for somebody you consider an authority on the matter to get you to comply with what they want.

As annoying and damaging as Garners behaviour is, if (and I agree we can't say this for certain, although it seems very plausible to me) he's been told the same things as I once was, he's also a sort of victim of manipulation. So in a sense I also feel a bit sorry for him. Maybe because I see myself in him when he's proclaiming the gospel of LP and the mind's incredible power over the body? Just as I once did, only thankfully not quite as publicly and with way less impact, because it reached a lot fewer people and I'm not viewed as an expert within the field of medicine.
 
But surely that's the point. He's not the same as the average victim of the LP cult, for whom I have huge sympathy.

He's got 40+ years experience as a doctor, professor of medicine, and expert in clinical trials. However persuasive his trainer is, he has agency and knowledge. He presumably also has former colleagues who should be telling him what an idiot he is making of himself.

I just don't get how someone in that position can be so blinded to the nonsense he's spouting, and the harm he's doing.
 
Mij said:
This is one of PG biggest fan boys, Jason Busse, Professor of Anesthesia; Assoc. Director of the MGD Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research; Canada Research Chair in Prevention & Management of Chronic Pain. He chooses to 'plug his ears' whenever a pwME tires to explain their experiences with PEM.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1862236397953765866
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So weird to push this nonsense. They really don't care one bit about validity or credibility:
Participants described trying a variety of interventions, including prescription pharmaceuticals, complementary and alternative remedies, supplements, dietary modifications and cognitive and rehabilitation programmes (Supporting Information S1: Appendix A); however, participants who experienced partial recovery did not report any consistent pattern of ‘helpful’ or ‘unhelpful’ interventions. Among fully recovered participants, all but one attributed their success to a combination of mind-body techniques and graduated activity (e.g., guided coaching, the Lightning Process, neurocognitive training); one participant achieved full recovery through benediction by a religious figure.
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So, basically random despite an obviously cherry-picked sample. This is entirely consistent with retroactive attribution, the exact same process all other pseudosciences utilize. Plus the lack of any report of unhelpful intervention when CBT and GET are widely reported as such makes it clear this is not a representative sample. When your model fits perfectly alongside recovery from benediction by a religious figure and you can't question your methods, then nothing you produce can be taken seriously.

And this may explain why people like Garner are so bizarre and pushy about it:
Those who experienced full recovery using mind–body interventions moved on from their ME/CFS symptoms but still reported employing the cognitive and behavioural changes that they learned from the intervention when experiencing future health issues.
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Why would someone who is fully recovered have to continuously look themselves in the mirror and confidently remind themselves that they are healthy, they are ready, they can do it?

Absolutely nothing in this paper can be considered evidence for anything. It's entirely an opinion editorial that interprets cherry-picked stories with retroactive attribution and ignores the 100-1000x number of people who try these things with no benefit, and those who improve or recover without any of this. Completely unserious nonsense. There are zero insights in this paper, it's promotional material for their pseudoscience.
 
In the study's acknowledgement-section they thank Recovery Norway for help with recruiting participants. It's not very surprising then that they find that all of the recovered patients had done some form of mind-body-techniques, as this is literally a prerequisite to become a member there:

In order to become a full member of Recovery Norway, one must fulfil one of the following two criteria:

  1. You have had and have recovered from CFS/ME or another so-called “medically unexplained” health problem, for example fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), tinnitus (auditory ringing noises). You have to have become well through a method or strategy that broadly involves changes in thinking or behavioural patterns or human interaction (not primarily changes in diet, supplements or pharmaceutical interventions. Neither can you have recovered from alternative therapies that are not compatible with a scientific worldview or model of the body).
  2. You are next of kin to such a person.
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The source: Become a member – Recovery
 
Trish said:
But surely that's the point. He's not the same as the average victim of the LP cult, for whom I have huge sympathy.

He's got 40+ years experience as a doctor, professor of medicine, and expert in clinical trials. However persuasive his trainer is, he has agency and knowledge. He presumably also has former colleagues who should be telling him what an idiot he is making of himself.

I just don't get how someone in that position can be so blinded to the nonsense he's spouting, and the harm he's doing.
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I think personality is also a factor. Lots of people exist in these states which seem opposed; where they study physics and the universe but reverently attend church each week for example. Or preach about the magnitude of sinning or bad behaviour, but then get exposed as holding drug and drink fuelled parties with sex workers etc. The woman at the head of the Post Office cover up was a vicar!?

Ironically, their psychology is fascinating and worthy of repeated study.
 
In order to become a full member of Recovery Norway, one must fulfil one of the following two criteria:

  1. You have had and have recovered from CFS/ME or another so-called “medically unexplained” health problem, for example fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), tinnitus (auditory ringing noises). You have to have become well through a method or strategy that broadly involves changes in thinking or behavioural patterns or human interaction (not primarily changes in diet, supplements or pharmaceutical interventions. Neither can you have recovered from alternative therapies that are not compatible with a scientific worldview or model of the body).
  2. You are next of kin to such a person.
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If that is not extreme bias through self-selection, and automatic disqualification from serious consideration, I don't know what is.
 
Neither can you have recovered from alternative therapies that are not compatible with a scientific worldview or model of the body
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As that statement excludes recovery via "changes in thinking or behavioural patterns or human interaction", very few should be able to pass the criteria. Those who do are likely to have recovered for reasons unconnected to any therapy.
 
The reactions Paul Garner compares to PEM are immediate reactions that can occur in some people. I had terrible sickness with Chemo but going back to the same hospital or even passing the ward doesn't bring on the sickness.

It does also not result in sickness that can occur up to 48/72 hours later and last for days or weeks. Blushing is straight away not constant for days and getting worse. Tachycardia I presume for most people starts straight away.

He simply doesn't understand PEM and is comparing apples to oranges. His examples are immediate.
 
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Paul Garner going on about PEM being classical conditioning makes me think he's probably been exposed to Vegard Bruun Wyllers (unproven and implausible) "sustained arousal theory".

Bruun Wyller lists these factors in his strange BPS-model which can be read here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19236717/

Bruun Wyller is a close friend and ideological ally of Live Landmark as well, by the way.

I also remembered just now that Garner has actually mentioned Wyller and his theory in this newspaper piece:

My nervous system scanned for alarm signals, described by the Oslo-based physician Vegard Wyller as “false fatigue alarms”, and after a time, classical conditioning (learned by association) caused the “kickback” symptoms in response to these signals.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/10/long-covid-hope-recovery-symptoms
 
Sean said:
If that is not extreme bias through self-selection, and automatic disqualification from serious consideration, I don't know what is.
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Ah, well, you are not an esteemed professor of medical evidence publishing in the ultra competitive medical academia, where everything published is meant to influence the lives of millions with real-life, sometimes terrible if wrong, consequences.

Because clearly it not only does not disqualify but clearly doesn't bother any of the many people involved in publishing this crap, and would in fact likely be considered a good thing if it was pointed out. Because it validates expectations, and in medical academia this is automatic code for "this study is not just good, it's great". And also because why would you listen to the whiny nay-sayers who have invalid beliefs about being ill? When you have this perfectly corrupt cult-like for-profit commercial entity that can supply a few converts?

Everyone knows it's the beliefs driving the illness. Therefore asking only people who have stopped those beliefs, with their hands and weird rituals, can be considered valid. Obviously!
 
rvallee said:
Ah, well, you are not an esteemed professor of medical evidence publishing in the ultra competitive medical academia, where everything published is meant to influence the lives of millions with real-life, sometimes terrible if wrong, consequences.

Because clearly it not only does not disqualify but clearly doesn't bother any of the many people involved in publishing this crap, and would in fact likely be considered a good thing if it was pointed out. Because it validates expectations, and in medical academia this is automatic code for "this study is not just good, it's great". And also because why would you listen to the whiny nay-sayers who have invalid beliefs about being ill? When you have this perfectly corrupt cult-like for-profit commercial entity that can supply a few converts?

Everyone knows it's the beliefs driving the illness. Therefore asking only people who have stopped those beliefs, with their hands and weird rituals, can be considered valid. Obviously!
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I wonder what pushback he got when he was dismissive of Cochrane (in his I :heart: ME phase)
 
Mij said:
This is why we need a biomarker/s that identifies delayed PEM so that we can ditch the term ME/CFS and let PG claim his own version of ME/CFS.

Explaining symptoms & emphasising active persuit of mental and physical tasks aided recovery in #longcovid. BIGGER benefits were seen in people with PEM (post exertional malaise). Brilliant work
@jp_selvakumar @NerliTom
https://twitter.com/user/status/1870160062280323568
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Bobbins
Also small study that wants a larger study
<500 people for <2 months, 35% drop out rate, this is the best he’s got?
 
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