Short fatigue questionnaire: Screening for severe fatigue, 2020, Knoop et al

Open access, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399920307911

 

As usual they are talking about tired people. Or maybe very tired people.

They say this for example:

Uh, NO. Clueless as usual. Who is it they are claiming to describe here. Or are they just gas-lighting for fun and profit.

 

They are certainly not describing ME "fatigue".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4295717/

 

It's amazing how much they tell when they insist on what the concept is NOT, where they literally describe what it actually is. The only common feature they agree on is rejection of reality. Like the recent CBT for CFS document that asserts that sick children and teens with CFS don't want to get back to their old self, which is literally the only thing they want. Hell, it's even the thing they all say. It's like they have a need to contradict everything we say, that their entire thing is basically being against whatever we need.

Right up there with someone asserting that the main reason people go to a restaurant isn't food. What kind of madness is this? This is all basically bizarro world science, where everything is backwards, even the thinking.

 

Did the researchers actually listen to what these patients were describing? Could they not work out that these patients were fed up of being gas-lighted and were responding to the inadequacies of the questionnaire?

 

Never. Not even once. Ideology is a mind-killer.

 

Despite Participant A stating explicitly (in the true manner of a lawyer) that she didn't suffer from fatigue they still lept referring to her illness as a fatigue/energy problem, rather than an illness that makes her feel physically sick!

 

When I first got ill in the early 80's, I don't think I ever used the word "fatigue." To me the word "fatigue" implies prior exertion. I felt like crap just sitting in one place all day.

I always told doctors that I felt like I had the flu (sans fever, or upper respiratory symptoms). I doubt I ever used the words "fatigue" or "malaise." I would have just said "I feel sick."

When I first heard the term "chronic fatigue syndrome" I really doubted that it applied to me. Then I discovered the range of symptoms that that innocuous term obscured.

 

It's as if what they hear when we talk is like when the adults talk in Peanuts. It's just noise to them. The substance of what we say never gets past the ear filter that turns everything into annoying waa-waa.

 

It's curious that they claim the scale is "valid" without ever testing it for face and content validity by patients. Likewise, construct validity cannot be assumed without utilising objective measures of functioning.

 

Given how little is actually known about fatigue it's weird how much time they keep exploring fatigue levels via questionnaires. Of course this is because they can't do actual science so the grade school stuff of inane questions seems to be accepted enough to keep them employed.

It would be much much more useful for someone to tackle the hard issues of what is fatigue, is it all one same thing, what are it's qualities, what is the biology?

Nobody much seems to care. I can only suppose that they think the psych's have it covered as it's their area. And yet they can't even develop useful questionnaires as tools so why are they still getting money? There is far too much psych research. And universities just keep churning out more.

 

because idiots give funding based on the number of papers published and not on the quality .the system has always been broken .

 

Spot on