BMJ Rapid Response: Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a meme? 18 June 2014

[Firestormm]

It's a bit weird that response from Ellen now I have read it. Ah well. I guess it makes the points... strange though..

 

[Valentijn]

It's a bit weird that response from Ellen now I have read it. Ah well. I guess it makes the points... strange though..

I dunno, I thought it was pretty spot on

 

[lansbergen]

Collings and Newton also alluded to secondary (financial) gain. Surely, only a fool would try and obtain benefits using a contested illness.

Didn't Ris Weasel say the self employed don't get it because they can not afford to?

 

[chipmunk1]

A few years ago when similar views were expressed, a group of medical experts offered to inject the sceptics with enterovirus, the pathogen most often associated with post-viral CFS. So far, the sceptics have been surprisingly reluctant to take up their offer. Why? If the illness is largely a product of the transmission of information, they will not become ill.

Yeah and when doctors or psychologists become ill they don't do CBT either.

The psychobabblers have nothing to fear if it's really mind over matter as they can control their immune system with their all powerful positive thoughts that will kill pathogens more efficiently than high dose radiation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8050655/ME-patients-banned-from-giving-blood.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...nic-fatigue-syndrome-from-donating-blood.html

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/192814.php

Strange that the mainstream media and health officials seem to love to spread the it's all in your mind ideas but get scared when their own health is at risk.

The have nothing to fear, even when they get infected they can still do some CBT and GET.

 

[Leopardtail]

It's a bit weird that response from Ellen now I have read it. Ah well. I guess it makes the points... strange though..

In what way do you find it weird?

 

[Leopardtail]

Yeah and when doctors or psychologists become ill they don't do CBT either.

The psychobabblers have nothing to fear if it's really mind over matter as they can control their immune system with their all powerful positive thoughts that will kill pathogens more efficiently than high dose radiation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8050655/ME-patients-banned-from-giving-blood.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...nic-fatigue-syndrome-from-donating-blood.html

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/192814.php

Strange that the mainstream media and health officials seem to love to spread the it's all in your mind ideas but get scared when their own health is at risk.

The have nothing to fear, even when they get infected they can still do some CBT and GET.

mmmm..... doesn't one call that 'faith healing' ??

 

[Leopardtail]

Didn't Ris Weasel say the self employed don't get it because they can not afford to?

I must have another disease then 'ME self employed variant' since I was self employed both in the run up to ME and for many years with it.

 

[lansbergen]

I must have another disease then 'ME self employed variant' since I was self employed both in the run up to ME and for many years with it.

Same here.

 

[chipmunk1]

mmmm..... doesn't one call that 'faith healing' ??

yes.

faith healing is something that medicine considers to be ineffective and unscientific strangely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_healing

The American Cancer Society states "available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments."[3] "Death, disability, and other unwanted outcomes have occurred when faith healing was elected instead of medical care for serious injuries or illnesses."[3] When parents use faith healing in the place of medical care, many children have died that otherwise would have been expected to live.[4] Similar results are found in adults.[5]

 

[Dolphin]

Susanna Agardy submitted this four days ago to the BMJ, but it hasn't gone up, so she has started posting it around:

Response to ‘Is chronic Fatigue Syndrome a meme?’

Susanna Agardy


Below is a rapid response I have submitted to the BMJ which has not been published. It is a response to another rapid response ‘Is chronic Fatigue Syndrome a meme?’ by Anthony D Collings Consultant Physician and David Newton to an Editorial by Peter D White titled ‘What causes chronic fatigue syndrome?’

http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7472/928/rapid-responses Both articles were published in 2004 and have been resurrected. I would be interested to know what instigated this resurrection.


The authors comment on a definition of a meme : ‘Dawkins used the term particularly in relation to religious beliefs and defined it as an idea or group of ideas which propagate between individuals and which share many of the characteristics of life, including the abilities of propagation and self defence, and the capacity to evolve.’


My response:


http://www.meassociation.org.uk/201...-to-consider-wider-implications-20-june-2014/

It would be appropriate for the authors to apologise for this harmful piece of speculation. It adds nothing to knowledge about CFS or ME. Rather, it promotes ignorance, to the detriment of patients with these conditions.

It has finally gone up: http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7472/928/rr/703896

 

[Firestormm]

Susan Agardy's Rapid Response now published: http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7472/928/rr/703896

29 June 2014
Susanna Agardy
Retired

Nil
c/o PO Box 6156 Hawthorn West PO 3122 Australia

Rigorous reasoning is missing from ‘meme’ idea

The piece, Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a meme? is replete with errors of reasoning and interpretation in the claims made by Doctors Collings and Newton. The authors seem to accept their invention of ‘CFS’ as a meme as fact. This perspective then leads them to attribute perverse motives to people with CFS which justify their bias. Behaviours and attitudes of these patients which would be considered normal in other people are portrayed as irrational and pathological.

The authors claim that ‘It is generally accepted that membership of a CFS peer group is a predictor of poor outcome of treatment, and it has been argued that this may be due to negativity within the groups as to diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.’

They resort to the use of rhetorical devices like it is ‘generally accepted’ and ‘it has been argued’: ‘accepted’ and ‘argued’ by whom? Perhaps these terms are being used to disguise the fact that the conventional caution relating to statements about causality is being thrown to the wind here...

Read more: http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7472/928/rr/703896

 

[Ninan]

We're part of a long and glorious tradition here. Supposedly Marcel Proust, who spent half his life in bed due to asthma, had a doctor who claimed his condition was psychological. That should explain why most the doctors in Proust's novels seem to be pretentious assholes.

I'd say this meme-person isn't totally out on a ride with his bike (as we say in Sweden ), though he got most of it wrong. We do influence each other. When I finally realized what it was I had, from an article about a woman who was housebound, I got a bad scare which made me permanently worse. I had just gotten a new job (which I loved) and was kind of in limbo financially and the diagnose sure didn't help. Though of course I'm glad I know what's wrong with me.

Finding out I had ME didn't cause my symptoms, they'd been there and made me housebound from time to time ever since I got an ear infection three years and five months earlier. But it did make them worse. It all fits nicely into the biomedical picture, though. Stress makes us worse and finding out you have an debilitating illness which most doctors don't even believe exist and for which there is no cure and virtually no help from society is pretty stressful. Many of us wouldn't get as sick if we didn't have to fight so hard to get the help we need.

 

[MeSci]

I think I would be more inclined to compare it to "The Daily Sport" or "Viz" (smutty and teenage newspapers for those not in England.

I'm a teenager again at last! I actually like Viz, which is a cartoon comic and is sometimes very funny. It was a great tonic to me when I was seriously ill in hospital. The Sport is another matter - is indeed claimed to be a newspaper but no one with a brain would recognise it as such.

 

[Leopardtail]

LOL, glad it brought you some mirth

 

[Esther12]

Have they decided that any problem to do with this is all patients fault yet? When's that going to happen?

 

[Leopardtail]

Have they decided that any problem to do with this is all patients fault yet? When's that going to happen?

sorry not understanding you Esther!

 

[Esther12]

sorry not understanding you Esther!

Wasn't there some talk of some sort of 'review' related to this? I was just assuming that any concern the Essex CFS clinic may have felt will soon turn around to irritation at the foolish Cartesian dualism which led to patients failing to appreciate the value of the interesting hypothesis developed by their staff.

 

[worldbackwards]

Can't say I've waded through all nineteen pages of this, so I don't know if this is covered, but I can't help wonder what the authors expected to get out of this? Was it a kind of pledging allegiance to the the colours, but in such a way that they thought it would go under the radar, in the way that insulting stuff about ME never gets picked up on by the community or anything : )

 

[Snow Leopard]

Can't say I've waded through all nineteen pages of this, so I don't know if this is covered, but I can't help wonder what the authors expected to get out of this? Was it a kind of pledging allegiance to the the colours, but in such a way that they thought it would go under the radar, in the way that insulting stuff about ME never gets picked up on by the community or anything : )

The same perverse pleasure that trolls get when they provoke reactions on internet forums.

 

[worldbackwards]

The same perverse pleasure that trolls get when they provoke reactions on internet forums.

Would that be a dig? Because I didn't take any pleasure from any of that, and I did apologize (which was accepted). I'm just a bit rusty at speaking to people. You might know how it is.