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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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alex3619
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Philosophy of M.E.: If not Conspiracy, then What?
Part One: Verificationism
WARNING: Philosophy Alert! This is esoteric. It has points I am leading up to but might lose many people along the way.
One of the things I am leading up to is a further discussion of the what I am calling the...
WARNING: Philosophy Alert!
I intend to write a series of blogs giving the flavour of one line of argument in the book I am writing, though I am using many other lines of investigation as well. This is the view from a position of critical rationalism. Using different but well recognized...
Continuing my review of Ghaemi's The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model
This is the final and most disappointing section of the book. I think this is largely because what is attempted here is beyond the scope of a section of a book, or indeed of an entire book. Instead its a promise...
(Part Two of My Review of the book by Ghaemi.)
This section of the book is a lot less clear and less focussed. There is no transparent way to easily show how BPS has fallen. It is more the case that it has fallen, and the book articulates many ways in which this has happened.
The single...
PS I have said this before but I think it is worth repeating: if we have a psychosomatic illness because a physical illness cannot be objectively shown, how is a psychosomatic illness any more valid since it cannot be objectively shown?
The thread for this is...
This is a detour from my three-quarter written blog on another aspect of philosophy of science - but not much of a detour. It still addresses a topic on my long term agenda.
We spend of lot of energy blaming people who do various things we don't like. In particular, private complaints about...
I am posting this as a blog as I intend to use it to launch a series of blogs detailing a range of related issues. This is in preparation for my investigating some specific issues in-depth, but which I will not blog about. Instead I intend writing an article or perhaps a book. Alternatively I...
There is a blog entry describing the impact of the slashes to social support for the disabled in the UK.
http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com/2012/01/start-of-my-campaigning-nowhere-to-turn.html?showComment=1326701039727#c1910446857344218273
I just launched the pacifists version...
Some time ago I made a series of complaints about failed postal service to my address. Most of these were rejected, but now I received a reply from a Senator.
Essentially due to incapacity to travel, when mail was not delivered even though I was home waiting for it I had to take a series of...
There have been many models of ME and CFS over the years. There are a number of issues that seem underemphasised that I wish to make explicit.
This is not a criticism of any of these models, its an analysis of issues common to many models.
My first model was made about 1998, involving...
I have in mind a horror story.
Imagine a world in which an insidious disease creeps through the population. It defies conventional medical techniques, baffles the medical community, and it creeps so slowly that it is hard to even be sure it is a pandemic. Those who investigate frequently...
None of these are original. Somebody else has said them all. They are heuristics, rules of thumb, which means they are only guides not laws set in stone. They should be considered opinion.
These are the kinds of things you often find at the bottom of day calendars on office desks. I am a...
For those of you who have been following anciendaze's blogs on Moral Hazards, or who have an interest in systems theory, most of the issues on biopsychosocial models can be explained by local rewarding of activity, but not rewarding based on global outcomes. There is risk of this problem in any...
The biopsychosocial movement is indeed under serious attack regarding CFS and ME - not from patients as sometimes claimed, but from advances in the biomedical science. The evidence is strong that the argument that ME and even CFS are functional somatic syndromes is seriously flawed. Similar...
Many of the old pagan and shamanistic religions recognize the existence of spirits. Spirits can't be seen, but they can be sensed. Every tree and rock has a spirit. So do people.
The mind is really spirit. So diseases of the mind are spirits. If CFS is a mental disease, it is a spiritual...
I was thinking about the mind-body problem, and then came across this piece on thinking yourself ill:
http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com/2011/07/modest-and-possibly-lucrative-proposal.html
Rather than follow along the same line of argument, I want to discuss something more esoteric...
Don't MEntion Fatigue.
The distinction between ME and CFS and its importance is complex. This is more an opinion piece, potentially in several parts, than a definitive analysis. I have written it to address some issues discussed in several different threads on Phoenix Rising.
Should we...
There is a stereotype for people with ME/CFS and related disorders that is based on the view that we are just pretending to be sick. This varies from accusations of blatant fraud to a pathological need for attention. The infamous biopsychosocial view of ME/CFS is a variant, in which we do not...
ME/CFS has been called the invisible disease. Those of us who are less ill are not visibly sick. Those of us who are very ill are so sick nobody ever sees us in the street. We are pale shadows of who we should have been, pale citizens of pale societies.
I look at these people and what they...