UK Times:'What if the thing that’s making you physically ill is your mind?', Feb 2020, Rumbelow [includes ME]

The article is behind a paywall but if you sign up for an account you can get two articles free each week.

I have attached screenshots of the first half of the article to give a flavour of its content.

 

Only just seen this in the Times2 print edition - arhhh!

Also mentions Suzanne O'Sullivan's book as "the first person to write substantially on this subject..." Evidently journalist not familiar with Shorter et al.

It's most of a two page spread on same page as the Dr Porter medical column.

 

Anthony David is the mate of Wessely's who nominated Sir Simon for the Maddox prize.

 

The problem is that having a medical qualification apparently gives an exemption from needing to know the relevant science.

Astronomically ignorant.

It is no different from a plumber postulating that the laws of fluid dynamics are different known physical laws, because he doesn't know any better, but has unclogged some drains.

 

I don't think you mean the actor here.

 

Two page spread? Grim.

 

Duh, thank you. Brain fog. Sorry my mistake the correct name is Anthony David (Professor).

 

There appears to be a push to legitimize this pseudoscientific idea. Pseudoscientific because they are claiming to know that something causes disease without there being any way to show that this something is present or absent in any person and corelates with the disease it is claimed to cause.

Maybe that is happening because CBT/GET is starting to look like it has not much of a future.

 

It's a puff piece to promote his book. Ignore it. It's factually inept.

 

I would agree. People have warned that the NHS have been preparing to push MUS/FND backed up by their IAPT programme being rolled out across the country.

 

I agree it’s an article to push his book, but what concerns me is that this MUS/FND paradigm has a lot of support in the NHS.

 

I am tempted to make a Wonko-style nonsensical observation here - but only to provide a sort of 'Amen chorus' to an eternal truth.
I have visions of dung beetles pushing balls of pseudoscientific dung up a sand dune to feed their larvae dressed in blue cardigans and other assorted 'chattering class regalia'.
Thank God that amongst all this post-truth orgification there is S4ME.

 

I had a peep. It is too dreadful to even register for this month's free peepie.

I was quite interested by Thought for Today today on BBC Radio 4 Today. A regular lady priest was agonising over the issue of whistleblowers in the context of the Chinese doctor who reported the coronavirus and got duffed by police and then died of the virus. She could not decide whether whistleblowers were a good thing because they revealed the truth or troublesome because we need to have faith in people we value as experts. Jeeze, I thought, are there really people so constipated in the mind that they prefer to have faith in charlatans than hear that they are charlatans?

The odd thing is that it seems to me that twenty years ago nobody would have been so gauche as to say something so dumb. Saying really dumb things got weeded out; at least I thought it did. Now weeding out dumb things is seen as dumbist - you know, discrimination and that.

Thank God for S4ME.

 

Mind boggles! Sounds like she is on the brink of advocating for an authoritarian state.

 

A tad under 1.5 pages, which include two photos - the largest of which is the usual - well dressed female, 30s, full make up, jewellery, head in manicured hands - the usual. The other is a photo of the author of the book.

 

I got the impression there wasn't much on the brink about it!

 

I was intrigued and so went and listened to it, agree as despite her faux agonising her message was clear.

 

There may be some, not amongst the regulars, for whom it would be useful to point out that David was a co-author with Wessely and Pelosi in 1988 proclaiming a new approach to PVFS. They were all rather junior at the time. He was one of those who proposed that ME was due to dysfunctional cognitions and maladaptive behaviour, recommending in a 1989 paper, CBT and GET in the full knowledge that there were potential dangers,

Little has been heard of him of late, but when you have a book to sell and the credulous Murdoch press to assist....

 

I had forgotten - he was a co-author on the 1989 paper that claimed to be a speculative hypothesis paper about CBT for ME yet went on to say what should be done about 15 times (before any trials had been done). Perhaps the worst of all papers in the field.

 

This is just as nonsensical as the stuff pushed by Goop and 1,000x more dangerous because it is promoted as being valid science by official bodies, authorities and news media.

There is literally a crisis of confidence in expertise at the moment, mostly centered on medicine thanks to Horton and The Lancet. Promoting pseudoscience like this will push that crisis over a tipping point. The same people (rightfully) whining about Goop are pushing astrological-level pseudoscience, how is anyone supposed to make sense of the idea that experts know better when they do the same things, just for different reasons?

For the general public this is extremely confusing as it works precisely on the most effective method of fake news: promoting multiple confusing and ambiguous versions of the truth so as to destroy the very notion that there is an actual objective truth out there. The message is "trust us, we're experts" while the experts are pushing made-up nonsense that nearly HALF of all medical problems are purely psychogenic, without evidence, in fact against all reasonable evidence and in complete contradiction to the lived experience of those suffering from it.

Reckless and irresponsible, in the pursuit of a mediocre ideology that failed every test, big and small and will fail once more, this time sinking yet more lives with it.

This is why we can't have nice things! You can't fight pseudoscience at the same time as you push for your own personal pseudoscience you believe in strictly and entirely out of personal, discredited, convictions. Switching spirituality for psychology is not the damn issue!