The prevalence and treatment of health anxiety in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) - Jo Daniels 2018

Without objective measures for both entry and outcome, claims of PF improvements are nonsensical.

 

That's what I was chasing down, but decided it may not be such a big deal. The score of 18 for SHAI is as they describe, just in clinical range. i.e Just out of the no-health-anxiety region. So they took a sample of people with CFS having at least some health anxiety (which I felt would likely be most people with CFS), and they concluded 42% of those had severe health anxiety.

 

This is the 'real' BPS that Wessley et al co-opted: the idea that social distress is important in medicine, not that psychiatric interventions should effectively replace biomedical ones.

 

AKA correlation is literally the same thing as causation, amirite guys?!

That is ultimately the fatal flaw in the psychosocial nonsense: it can all be perfectly explained by Occam's razor. Sick people behave like sick people, get over it. This is exactly what you expect to find and just because YOU don't understand that there are extraordinary circumstances does not change the fact that there are.

I like to compare it to the Trump error, because this is something narcissists do regularly: "nobody knew X" because they just found out about it and assume if they didn't know then no one could possibly know because they are solipsists. Wessely has written several times about this, that because HE could not find a cause than no one in the history of ever would find a cause so might as well work on all those weird correlations that can be so easily confused as a cause because it makes for a great career and a knighthood and all this fancy stuff even though his hands are overflowing with blood.

Uh, rant. I'm so sick of this shit. People are ruining my life and I can't do anything about it. And no, I'm not anxious about it. I'm mad and angry and want Justice with a huge capital J.

 

There are few more effective tools for controlling and directing a population than to imply they're 'just crazy'. They bristle in outrage at the suggestion, and they've proved you right. They subside into politeness and deference, and you've fixed the problem. We're far from the only ones.

While not everyone will react to this situation by feeling depressed or anxious, that would be a totally normal, reasonable response.

I had more of this but I had to stop here before I worked myself up!

 

My first issue with this study is that the secondary aim:

is predicated on the expectation that health anxiety will be found in the CFS sample. This shows the researchers are biased.

 

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