"The denouement". My answer to prof. Knoop.

My response to Knoop et al. to an opinion piece in a Dutch national newspaper. Mostly myth busting.

http://anilvanderzee.com/the-denouement/

 

Very nice. Any chance it can be published in the same newspaper?

 

I send it to them but my blog is way too long I think. Let's see.

 

Didn't know where to put it. Please do if it's any better. Thank you!!!

 

The CBT proponents seem rather nervous these days. They can see the end approaching.

As Valentijn says in her comment, they have nobody but themselves to blame if the end of CBT for ME/CFS is rather unpleasant and embarassing.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/979311041455718401

 

Very important, that bit. Seems to have been swamped a bit lately by the – highly justified – critiques focusing on subjective outcome measures in open label studies and changes in outcome measures part way through a study. So it's good to bring it to the forefront again. If you don't start with a well-defined patient cohort any study results will be invalid, no matter how good or bad the study methods are afterwards.

Somewhere I saw the analogy that confounding the symptom chronic fatigue with the illness ME/CFS is like confounding the symptom headache with the illness migraine. Imagine you collected a bunch of people with sore heads, of any sort, and used that cohort to find a treatment for migraine. Likely you'd reach the conclusion that aspirin was effective for migraine!

 

Conflating of chronic fatigue with ME It's amazing that "professor" and "evidence based" are part of Knoop's title description

 

As New York State Health Commissioner, Howard A Zucker, wrote in May of last year (bolding mine):

 

A couple of hundred years ago or so it would have been Wizard, Shamen, Soothsayer, etc.

 

Exactly That's why I also added a picture of a magician Though that's already way too much credit for Knoop.

 

It can be worth shortening and seeing if it can be published, or even submitted as an opinion piece

 

I know. But PEM is in the way at the moment

 

I understand