You may wonder why the CAA treats XMRV the way they do... So:

[biophile]

Responding to the psychobabble

Some exceptional posts on this thread.

I would like to see large advocacy groups do more than critically review biomedical research, but also actively combat the "reams of psychobabble" that keep flowing from certain quarters. Put it in their official mandate, hire someone full time to fairly evaluate the research and respond appropriately.

It is the year 2010 for heaven's sake, we are sick of seeing the same tired old flaws and poor standards in research over and over after all these years. I would be embarrassed to have my name on any professional paper which can be mauled by lay patients for its dodgy methodology.

 

[Sam Carter]

When he finishes with obesity and CFS I would love to see him take on the whole idea of psychogenic disease. Like Kurt and others above I'm significantly skeptical of almost all of it, except maybe PTSD. I have looked for broad papers shring my perspective and haven't located any yet. Many 'anti-psychiatry' people like Thomas Szasz have a perspective quite dissimilar to mine.

I've said it before but since someone mentioned OCD, Susan Swedo found OCD was 10-15x more common in the immune-related disease systemic lupus. Yet it is probably not a psychological reaction to being physically diseased (something that is certianly possible a priori), because it seems not to be more common in conjucntion with other diseases. Most diseases are pretty much psychologically the same, at bottom: they suck, more or less severely - but I guess they are not completely the same. I suppose lupus is a little different because it can fairly often put severe skin rashes on the face.

I've got some OCD right here, and it's not quite mild. It started at the same time as everything else, when it was all still just starting to get going.

A cytokine / inflammatory model of depression:

The malaise theory of depression: Major depressive disorder is sickness behavior and antidepressants are analgesic

Bruce G Charlton MD

Medical Hypotheses, 2000; 54: 126-130