CFS at British Association For Behavioural And Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) conference 2016

[Hip]

Also, clearly you have not visited any restaurants in SoHo.

Pretty whacky crowd are they down there, then?

 

[alex3619]

What about ME patients with no chronic fatigue? They exist. What about "recovered" CFS patients with little fatigue but still have all the other symptoms? They exist too. A lot of what is called fatigue is not fatigue.

 

[Large Donner]

I agree that it would be very wrong to suggest that ME/CFS is just fatigue. Not knowing the content of the presentation, though, it's hard to say what is being said.

Na its not that hard. The clues are:

1) Trudie Chalder.

2) Presentation given at a conference of cognitive behavioural therapists.

3) Fatigue is best viewed on a continuum with fatigue as a symptom at one end of the spectrum and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) associated with profound disability at the other.

4) Up to 75% of people with CFS also have a mood disorder.

5) Over about 25 years worth of research trial findings show that both cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) are moderately effective treatments for CFS that are not associated with harm.

6) The aim of this lecture is to describe the overlap between fatigue and emotion, the evidence for CBT and GET, the nature of the interventions and how they work according to recent meditational analyses and long term follow ups.

 

[TiredSam]

BABCP? What kind of an acronym is that? I despair.

 

[worldbackwards]

BABCP? What kind of an acronym is that? I despair.

They're clearly weakening. Now is our time to strike!

 

[K22]

Can we imagine how helpful it would be if that other very fatiguing serious illness, MS, was treated in this manner?

 

[duncan]

I think MS was at one time treated similarly, yes? Wasn't it in the mid-'50's assumed to be psychosomatic?

I seem to recall only recently seeing a new paper about psychosomatic elements in MS patients.

 

[K22]

I don't have a problem with the psychological aspects of physical illness being explored in proper proportion & in proper context, although I think there's a worrying tendency to psychologise fatigue aspects in MS, sjogrens etc as well, I guess because it's not yet fully medically explained. The Kings group however put psych /behavioural factors as the principal ones in CFS and ignore the important multi-system disease "bit" the IOM. atleast have recognised.

 

[Large Donner]

Can we imagine how helpful it would be if that other very fatiguing serious illness, MS, was treated in this manner?

It is, under the banner of CFS/conversion disorder/functional disorder and so are lots of other diseases as well as ME.

 

[Hip]

The Kings group however put psych /behavioural factors as the principal ones in CFS and ignore the important multi-system disease "bit" the IOM.

Yes, this is precisely what I don't like about the King's College London psychologists: they have this wrongheaded assumption that psychological factors are driving or maintaining the physical symptoms of ME/CFS.

King's College are looking at ME/CFS the wrong way around: in vain they are trying to see if psychological symptoms might be causing the physical symptoms of the disease (the theoretical pile of nonsense known as somatization), when what they should be doing is trying to understand how the physical abnormalities in ME/CFS give rise to the neurocognitive and neuropsychological symptoms.