It's interesting to listen to some of the narrative as he gives it in retrospect. There was the person who helped him, making the initial claim that he certainly couldn't have ME/CFS because he was too old and the wrong sex.
Later he agrees that this isn't true but explains this was a clever way of shifting him. Subsequently he claims that
women may ruminate more.
Again
noting his sister had ME/CFS. Raelen Agle
also had mother and grandmother with ME/CFS. Yet he doesn't "see it as a genetic something" (
47:59). RA thinks it's just about
"being a woman, about our habits our behaviours, our way of dealing with emotions" 
PG
comments about "agency being taken away" by genetics and "a lot of fuss being made about a study in the UK" (DecodeME). He then partly mischaracterises about genetic destiny, before settling back on influence on risk. "Of course it does play on people's minds and that's something you can't fix and of course that leads to rumination."
Also that he had some concerning unexplained symptoms
in the year prior to the pandemic. He was
invalidated by his doctor.
"'Well it's just stress.' Well I burst into tears then because I thought he wasn't validating me. He said 'well there you are, there you go.'"
It's hard to understand how he tries to rationalise his experience of PEM at
09:00.
[Feeling better at 12 weeks he does a HIIT class] "… felt sort of all right and then the next day I was completely floored for about a week. It was the worst sort of pains that I had. I can certainly understand how people develop these ideas about, you know, you have this period where you over-exert and then you're knocked out… for days."
It sounds as if he thinks this is a single or relatively restricted few episode(s) that people then simply assume is continuing lifelong, rather than being their actual daily experience?
There's the
glycaemic overdose where he "scoffed the rest of the cake". The next morning "I felt really awful…"
Interestingly at
31:32 is the suggestion that BPS researchers might be mind-body dualists —
"Even talking about mind-body approaches. You know that is putting these two things as separate and they're not really separate you know? And research looks at cog… CBT and graded exercise therapy as if they're separate, but that's part of the dualism."
On the PACE trial
he notes it is much maligned but that patient charities were on the committee, which is somewhat unfortunately framed as the "execution committee".
A segment on the NICE guidelines begins at
34:47.
"The methods were… the analyses were not… we would have failed a masters student if they'd handed them in. They were very very badly done. I think they were over-influenced by a very strong biomedical lobby — an ideology that wanted to ban exercise and ban CBT."
"The word 'recovery' does not occur anywhere in the guideline. […] I mean I'm my own experience where somebody flipped my expectations and suddenly I started getting better, really. I mean I'm not saying that happens for everyone…"
"And the people with severe ME are to be kept in bed and away from light and strong smells. And, you know this is common sense that this doesn't really help."
