Protocol Reconceptualizing rehabilitation research via an enactive framework and a radically interdisciplinary cross-analysis... 2025 Levi et al

Full title: Reconceptualizing rehabilitation research via an enactive framework and a radically interdisciplinary cross-analysis: a study protocol on fatigue in post COVID-19 condition (PCC)

Abstract

Objective: To present a radically interdisciplinary research approach to ill-defined symptoms, with a focus on fatigue as a major symptom of post COVID-19 condition, where multiple and, to date, rarely combined approaches may yield a fuller understanding of these symptoms.

Design: Protocol for a mixed-methods study comprising an interdisciplinary cross-analysis.

Patients: 35 persons with post COVID-19 condition and severe fatigue were included, and 35 age-, sex-, and educationally matched controls who recovered from COVID-19 without post COVID-19 condition.

Methods: Participants were assessed by a multidisciplinary research team as follows: physician assessment; blood and urinalysis; spirometry and physical performance tests; neuropsychological tests; structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging; extended immunological tests (cytokines); and qualitative phenomenological analysis of interviews. Data will be analysed in accordance with established methods in each of these research fields and by a cross-analysis methodology developed from within an enactive framework. This framework encompasses a focus on neuroscientific, physiological, and experiential aspects of the person as a living being in their sociocultural world.

Conclusion: The biopsychosocial model needs to be implemented in research according to methods that allow radically different research paradigms, typically seen as incommensurable, to inform each other in a non-reductionist manner. One application of such an approach is therefore described.

Open access

 

As radical as a discarded theory from 1977?

 

What does ‘non-reductionist’ mean in this context?

 

BPS feel squeezed out, now they want back in.

 

How dare you try to explain illnesses without including our made-up concepts?!

 

for you, for them.

 

The reductionist tries to explain events by how one thing acts on another thing.
We prefer to explain things by saying that the whole lot goes 'whoosh'.

 

Have they tried shaking and diluting the biopsychosocial model? A few thousand times ought to do it. Do what? It. What more needs to be done? You do the thing, you have done the thing. Just like rehabilitation. Once you rehabilitate someone, they're rehabilitated, what more data could one possibly need?

The problem they are making is that the biopsychosocial model is not open to research. It can't be researched. The tools don't exist for this, and it has zero meaningful basis as anything but a belief system. There is simply no such thing as biopsychosocial research in a strict sense. As a concept, it's far less defined than communism, and so suffers an even more extreme case of "this is the true biopsychosocial model". They're trying to science beliefs. It doesn't work like that. Nothing works like that. Nothing that has ever worked has been figured out like that.

Reading my way through this, it basically just describes what they did, all of which is typical biopsychosocial. Which itself is also typical biopsychosocial. That's useless. And not research. Ugh, let go of the damn philosopher's stone and be done with this nonsense.

Also, maybe just drop the cringe buzzword factor by a lot, please and thank you.

 

That feels more like wanting to write poetry than science?

 

Spot on.

Reductionism is also a straw man. It is claimed by the poets to be the method science. But note that whereas the reductionist tries to explain events by breaking things into components acting on each other the scientist finds rules of dynamics that usefully apply at whatever scale is relevant to the question in hand. So Newton treated the earth as a gravitational point rather than a vast bag of hot moving rock, coated in sea and mountains. He made the earth interact with a gravitational field that is everywhere and has no parts. Science since 1500 in many ways has been the replacement of an intuitive reductionism with progressive steps of anti-reduction. Modern physics in a sense only has universal fields and no parts at all.

 

Thank you for yet another explanation.

So the authors argue that we have to stay at a scale that allows for psychosocial interactions, but fail to recognise that the issue isn’t the scale but the validity and lack of falsifiability of their psychosocial models?

It seems to me like they are trying to mimick modern science in appearance without understanding what it actually entails.

 

It means don't think it's medical (aka biological), so the focus is psychosocial (aka psychological).

It's what they use when they want to say psychological but have to pretend that they're open-minded.