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

[It's M.E. Linda]

View attachment 13180

So she started discussing this, blocking people who raised concerns, and sympathising with Clare Gerada about being 'under attack', without actually listening to what Gerada said in the interview?

Blimey.

I’m not sure that was the full timeline @Kitty - it’s been a long week!
It was certainly a continuous and huge bodyblow to PwME - payback for George’s excellent article?

- From memory it was PG article on Monday,
- blocking by TG on Tuesday (she was happy to unblock people if you had a personal sponsor) - I believe that the abuse that she had received came from the mask/Covid deniers.
- TV programme Thursday (?). That was when TG had not heard exactly what CG had said.

A hard week for us all

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

It's as if the last article has been written by a different person.

In one way yes, absolutely.
Maybe not entirely though. I agree that all the earlier posts were sympathetic but I remember from the start being sceptical that he really understood the implications of what he had latched on to.

 

[MSEsperanza]

Not a (direct) reply to PG & CG, but good to see this Tweet by George Monbiot and the Tweet directly above this, too:

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1355477134018555905

 

[Binkie4]

I keep waiting for an appropriate moment to post this on the thread but maybe now will do.

A mind as sensitive to the breeze as thistledown is buffeted hither and thither by the tweeting of social media and the pinging of emails. As a result, symptomometers swing from zero to jangling infinity in some kind of Kafkaesque fairground.

Thank you @Jonathan Edwards. I haven't laughed out loud for what seems like a very long time.

 

[chrisb]

"Emotional lability" has alwys been cosidered a symtom of ME. I begin to wonder whether intellectual lability should also be considered.

 

[Kalliope]

 

[MSEsperanza]

TG: The testimony of someone who has responded to a particular therapy is not a dismissal of those who had a different experience.

Yet again this shows the depth of ignorance about how evidence works.
The fact that someone got better doing exercise does NOT mean that they RESPONDED to that exercise.

Edit: @Robert 1973 beat me to my suggestion to make this point on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/RobertHMcMullen/status/1355521422089715712

Also I think it would be good to have a transcript of the the moderator's question (complete wording) that prompted CG's answer.

Sorry I'm not able to do that myself.

Big thanks to everyone doing all this very good work on Twitter and beyond (documentation, transcription, genuine questions, factual arguments.)

 

[SallyC]

TG: The testimony of someone who has responded to a particular therapy is not a dismissal of those who had a different experience.

Except when one of the someones in question literally did that very thing in writing in his blog post a few days ago!

 

[Daisymay]

TG: The testimony of someone who has responded to a particular therapy is not a dismissal of those who had a different experience.

Yet again this shows the depth of ignorance about how evidence works.
The fact that someone got better doing exercise does NOT mean that they RESPONDED to that exercise.
At least it really does look as if these people have opened their own can of worms that at some point they will have to swallow.

Yes.

Plus she said this whilst seemingly being completely unaware of what CG had actually said on TV re exercise and was then rather surprised when someone pointed out what CG had said. So she was jumoing to conclusions, backing CG's perspective, without knowing the facts and then, as far as I can see, she didn't clearly correct this error.

 

[Robert 1973]

People at the Guardian and Observer seem to be finally waking up:


Meanwhile, the video tweet has had 35,000 views and over 200,000 impressions.

 

[rvallee]

NOT what Pavlov has shown at all. Pavlov showed that dogs can salivate to the sound of a bell when the bell is usually paired with food. He had nothing to say about "dysfunctional autonomic tracks in the brain", nor about dysfunctionality at all. Pavlov considered learning to be a normal and adaptive phenomenon.

The idea there can be "bad learning" would be totally foreign to Pavlov. Pigeons can learn pairings and will gradually "unlearn" when whatever pairing they learned no longer holds, slugs can learn and unlearn in the same way. It would make no sense to him that there were humans who could fail at these fundamental skills. Except perhaps if they were in a coma (but even then...)

This statement of is not about the author's experiences, feelings of beliefs, it is presented as fact - but it is hokey pseudoscience.

I always find it weird when people still trot out Pavlov. Dogs are smart. Dogs can learn. That's not conditioning, that's just learning that when the guy rings a bell there's food incoming. Smart dogs get that. Don't need to be a conditioned robot for that to happen.

Hell the entire food advertising industry is built on that: show people delicious-looking food and they'll get hungry and maybe buy your food. We can use our imagination and so can dogs, even if to a lesser degree. People have been obsessed with brainwashing for so long it seems people have missed that the whole premise has been invalidated, intelligence is far more complex than that. Militaries have tried everything, it's not that simple.

 

[Robert 1973]

Also I think it would be good to have a transcript of the the moderator's question (complete wording) that prompted CG's answer.

I’ve uploaded a video of the the whole interview here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/21888ojqavgjxcr/Video 28-01-2021, 14 17 39.mov?dl=0

if anyone wants to put it on YouTube and share, please feel free.






At the beginning the the interview Naga Munchetty says:
“We can speak to two people who have struggled with long covid also: Dr Clare Gerada is a GP and joins us from London, and Professor Paul Garner is an epidemiologist.”

So I think it’s pretty clear that she was presented, and presented herself, as someone who had long covid.

I can’t reply to CG because she’s blocked me. Perhaps someone could reply for me.

 

[Adrian]

Did the BBC just randomly choose these 2 people to invite on to their news programme to convey their 'personal experience'? Surely not, they must have been selected as perceived 'medical experts' with personal experience of having had Covid-19. She made an emphatic statement that there is no condition exercise doesn't help, speaking as a medical doctor, the ex-chair of the RCGP and the author of the RCGP's e-learning module on CFS/ME!

Did the BBC choose at all or was this a story pushed to them by a press lobby group such as the SMC?

 

[Trish]

Gerada seems to have made herself the expert GP for the BBC on everything to do with Covid. She's been on the main Radio 4 news program in the mornings several times. It's all too easy for a news organisation to keep going back to the same 'expert'.

 

[rvallee]

Powerful people? Always vague, never actually being up-front about what they mean, leaving the imagination to do the rest.

 

[dave30th]

It's all too easy for a news organisation to keep going back to the same 'expert'.

True, but the problem isn't really going back to the same person. The problem is perhaps choosing the wrong person to go back to.

 

[anniekim]

I thank Anna, a friend who is a physiotherapist specialising in rehabilitation, who helped me learn. Anna explained that the "busts" can be experienced as a reprint of their entire symptom complex in the acute phase. I learnt that in convalescence after a severe assault, the body goes into protect mode, so if it isn't getting space to recover, it shuts you down by bringing an embodied memory of the illness.

I had concerns about how things could turn out with Garner if he recovered - a distinct possibility having been ill for only a few months - ever since he wrote the above back in June. I was amazed he accepted such an explanation.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

TG's tweets seem to have lost any relation to logic or reality.
That last one on very powerful people is completely non sequitur.

 

[Sly Saint]

I’ve uploaded a video of the the whole interview here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/21888ojqavgjxcr/Video 28-01-2021, 14 17 39.mov?dl=0

downloaded it but something wrong with the video (it was sideways and out of sink with the audio, which was OK)
did a quick transcript from around half way through:

male interviewer "another thing of course you both have in common is that you are in a way experts, I mean one a GP and one an epidemiologist, I just wonder Paul, you presumably knew a lot about Covid, you are an expert in this field and there it happens to you."
PG: " Yes, you think you're an expert, when it happens to you you're just an ordinary patient just like everybody else, and you have to sit and reflect what's happening to you. It was an extremely frightening illness but I've learnt a lot about my own body and about how to recover and like Clare, like the importance of gentle exercise and positive thinking to take you forward out of it...............

female interviewer"you know what's interesting clare talking to you and paul, is that you are both very fit, you enjoy exercise, and psychologically it's a real shock being told as someone who exercises regularly, don't do it because you are going to damage yourself, then there's that fear that paul touched upon, that fear of getting back out there in case you get worse. What would you say Clare, to those people who are in this position and who are scared now, what would you say in terms of just living with the after effects of this"

CG:"Well there is nothing that isn't made better through exercise............"

male interviewer " ..you have two experts, two medical advisors both saying the approach mentally it's so important as well, taking that positive thought process ahead"

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

So there is little room for doubt that this is a case of recognised expert bullshit.