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

John Mac said:
As soon as a biomarker is found for a condition for some strange reason their treatment suddenly stops working
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Yeah I don’t think it’s because that’s when the advertising standard agency’s might step in, or risk of legal liability increases, I think it’s more nuanced and complex than that. In fact it would be reductionist and dualistic thinking to suggest otherwise.
 
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JemPD said:
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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Umm me too @JemPD

And all your points above. Have they not thought of these?

I think they probably have, and there is some mysterious motivational factor to account for why they just decided to go ahead and attempt to profit from this -real but also not real- framework anyhow.

A complete mystery :rolleyes:
 
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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 don't see how it's any different from the mainstream CBT-for-deconditioning-slash-illness-beliefs stuff. The only difference is the language, and barely at that. The substance is the exact same, and so is the message. There's plenty of it in the past that is just as bad.

There used to be a slim veil of academic language to it, but it was always clearly for effect and used with purpose to mislead. The literature is filled with awareness that the patients reject it all and recommendations to use pseudoscientific language to hide it. A distinction without a difference for this particular programme.
 
Mij said:
They're asking for donations. Why hasn't their hustle paid off yet?
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I was wondering if we should just welcome the fact that they'd found a home for the faithful & that hopefully they'd stick to talking to (their) faithful. Tad annoyed that they're looking for donations --- could that be enough to report them to the police?

Jonathan's post here comes to mind --- we could just keep repeating NICE --- "low or very low quality evidence"
https://www.s4me.info/threads/chron...c-fatigue-consortium.35388/page-3#post-495402
 
JemPD said:
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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and doesn’t square with the rate of people dumped into CFS bucket who were misdiagnosed and eventually are confirmed as having on those conditions listed. If they are allowed past the ‘no investigations it only encourages them’ nonsense of the old guidelines after they’ve been checked fir the basics (if they ever were)
 
Sean said:
We can do better than that. More 80% than is "very low quality", with the remainder being merely "low quality". (Can't remember the exact numbers.)

Hard to get much worse than that.
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Yip and I find it frustrating that rather than running studies with objective outcome criteria [seems you can barely go to the park without bumping into someone with a FitBit], i.e. to objectively assess the intervention, they just make up the results - what's the point of doing science like that? OK there are reasons to do "science like that"---.
 
Mij said:
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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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This post has been copied and following discussion moved from Opinion: ‘You don’t want to get better’: the outdated treatment of ME/CFS patients is a national scandal - George Monbiot
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If he has any wisdom at all Paul Garner should be reflecting that he doesn’t know his BPS bedfellows as well as he thinks he does. Sometimes the barrel of a gun looks a lot like a Guardian news article.

I’m very grateful for all the work recently and over the years that has made it possible for George Monbiot to take this on.
 
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MrMagoo said:
So is Garner no longer claiming Lightening Therapy cured his ME/CFS?
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I don't think Garner ever claimed he was cured by the Lightning Process. He preferred to spend his money on scuba diving holidays. He seems to have bee cured by a mysterious phone call from a psychiatrist friend in the USA if I remember rightly. Although there was something about contacting some nice people in Norway as well I think.

Ah yes, he remembers it well!
 
I may be mis-remembering this but wasn't the student in the phone call associated with Henrik Vogt?
Also didn't Trisha Greenhalgh travel to Norway as some sort of procedural opponent to him receiving his PhD, i.e. to give him an easy ride?
Trisha Greenhalgh and Paul Garner have become the BBC's go to people for Long Covid & ME replacing Wessely.
It's a small (BPS) world!
 
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I will admit I’m prone to misremembering accurately.
Edit -I meant inaccurately!
At the same time it feels, to me at least, that there was some “hinting” or “breadcrumbs up the garden path” blurring of him having ME.

So Garner recovered from Long Covid.
He contracted it around the first UK lockdown, March 2020. He was unwell after that for some time, however was running 5-10k within 3/4 months and doing BMF, and scuba diving in the Caribbean? within 6/7 by October? where he contracted Dengue fever.


He just met the Long Covid criteria. Just. Had the clinics been running, he may have been referred, equally he may not, given his exercise capabilities.
 
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John Mac said:
I may be mis-remembering this but wasn't the student in the phone call associated with Henrik Vogt?
Also didn't Trisha Greenhalgh travel to Norway as some sort of procedural opponent to him receiving his PhD, i.e. to give him an easy ride?
Trisha Greenhalgh and Paul Garner have become the BBC's go to people for Long Covid & ME replacing Wessely.
It's a small (BPS) world!
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Landmark is associated with Henrik Vogt through Recovery Norway. You also remember correctly that Greenhalgh was an opponent on Vogt's PhD in medical ethics.
 
It attracts people who like the idea of having special insight and standing in contrast to the unenlightened masses.

Garner told his story of recovery as if it was a test of character that he passed.

Perhaps what makes people vulnerable to BPS ideas is deep down feeling like illness is the result of a character flaw (which is approximately the message by the BPS model). What happens then if you believe this and suddenly become "one of those patients"? Maybe going around the internet and media telling the story of how they overcame their illness makes sure everybody knows they're a good person and shouldn't be punished.
 
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