Year: 2023
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Media Notes–Hasan Presses Fauci on Long Covid; Rehmeyer on Psych Diagnoses; Washington Post Explores Backstory of Recent Study
MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan can be a bulldog as an interviewer. He recently pressed Dr Anthony Fauci on the US government’s flat-footed response to the wave of long Covid cases. Dr Fauci came across as somewhat on the defensive and acknowledged that progress has been slow. He agreed that clinical trials to assess possible treatments…
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An Interview with Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki
Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, is a leading investigator into long Covid and has recently been tapped to lead a new Center for Infection & Immunity. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to and the American…
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A Physiotherapist’s Guide to Understanding and Managing ME/CFS
A new book, A Physiotherapist’s Guide to Understanding and Managing ME/CFS, has arrived at a timely moment. With so many long Covid patients being diagnosed with ME or ME/CFS, it is essential that physiotherapists—or physical therapists, in the US—grasp the essentials of the disease, and in particular the existence of post-exertional malaise (PEM). The book,…
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My Talk at Cambridge Last October on “Epidemiological Sleight-of-Hand: The Troubling Case of ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms’”
I gave a talk at Cambridge University last October called “Epidemiological Sleight-of-Hand: The Troubling Case of ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms.’” More accurately, I gave the same talk on two successive days—October 18th and 19th–because of video malfunctions on the first day. I thought I’d written a post about it, but when I searched recently, I couldn’t…
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Interview with Journalist Betsy Ladyzhets about NIH’s Flawed $1.2 Billion RECOVER Program for Long Covid
Betsy Ladyzhets is an independent health, science and data journalist who has been covering the coronavirus pandemic, including long Covid. While serving as a journalism fellow at MuckRock, she co-wrote an investigative report for STAT, a well-known health and medical news site, about the US National Institutes of Health’s problem-plagued $1.2 billion long Covid program,…
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Letter to Journal about Inflated Claims of FND Prevalence
I have spent some time trying to correct the record on the reported prevalence of functional neurological disorder (FND). As I have documented, leaders of the FND field have spent the last decade misrepresenting the findings of a seminal 2010 study, Stone et al, to claim that this diagnosis is the second-most-common presentation at outpatient…
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Call for Retraction of Cochrane Review from Science For ME; Overview of Viral Persistence in Long Covid; Senators United on Long Covid
Sometimes I just like to post about a few things that have caught my interest, for whatever reason. I keep meaning to do this more regularly. Science For ME calls on Cochrane to retract flawed exercise review The Science for ME (S4ME) forum has posted a petition on change.org requesting that Cochrane withdraw its “harmful”…
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Just the Latest Gibberish from Professor Chalder
I’ve said it before and will undoubtedly say it again. Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s mathematically and factually challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), is a one-trick pony. She writes what is essentially the same bad paper based on the same unfounded assumptions over and over again. Her apparent professional success represents, at least…
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Professor Chris Ponting Discusses on DecodeME’s First Results
Professor Chris Ponting is a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the principal investigator for DecodeME, a genome wide association study. The DecodeME team recently published findings from more than 17,000 questionnaires it had collected from patients. In our conversation, Professor Ponting discussed these results, why it is important to have patients…
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DecodeME Team Describes Study Sample; The Atlantic’s Ed Yong Covers PEM; STAT Busts NIH’s Stumbling Long Covid Efforts
DecodeME paper finds ME/CFS severity linked to being female, being older and being sick longer DecodeME is a high-profile genome-wide association study (GWAS) that is seeking to identify DNA differences between people with ME/CFS and those without it. To date, more than 17,000 people in the UK who report having been diagnosed with ME/CFS have…
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Rapid Response to Anti-NICE Whine de Coeur; UK Government Seeks Input to Interim Delivery Plan for ME/CFS
The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry (JNNP) has finally published a cogent rapid response to its recent whine de coeur from the PACE authors and their cronies. In the commentary, the co-authors criticized eight purported “anomalies” they believe occurred during the process of developing the 2021 ME/CFS guideline from Britain’s National Institute for Health…
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More on the Perplexing Dutch Claim that Null Results for Objective Measures of Physical Activity Are Irrelevant to Fatigue
I recently wrote about a Dutch study published a few months ago in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases–“Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nick-named ReCOVer, found that unblinded trials relying on subjective outcomes will produce modestly positive reports in the group receiving…