Category: ME/CFS
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Correctives from Putrino & Iwasaki (and Others) to the Long-Covid-Is-Psychosomatic Claims
When the pandemic began, everyone involved in the ME, CFS, and ME/CFS domain assumed that there would be a wave of post-acute, prolonged complications, since every virus seems to leave in its wake a small but still significant number of people who report a range of non-specific symptoms. It was also widely predicted that many…
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My Article About the Life–and Preventable Death–of Maeve Boothby O’Neill
Last week, Codastory.com published an article I wrote about Maeve Boothby O’Neill, a 27-year-old in Exeter, England, who died in October, 2021, from complications of ME. The specific cause appears to have been malnutrition. Despite being alerted to the seriousness of Maeve’s condition, the local hospital resisted appeals to insert a feeding tube during her…
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Double Talk on Mind-Body “Dualism” in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research?
Proponents of the psychosomatic approach to ME and long Covid–as well as the broader range of so-called “functional” disorders and/or “medically unexplained symptoms”–routinely declare that those who disagree with them are engaging in what they dismissively refer to as mind-body “dualism.” The mind and body are not separate entities, they note, and drawing sharp distinctions…
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After Last Year’s Tub Talk, Here’s an Interview–Clothed–for #MEAction’s Podcast
The last time I was interviewed about my work, I was sitting in a bubble bath with the guy tossing questions at me. That was, of course, my appearance last April on Tub Talks with Damon, a web series in which my friend Damon Jacobs, a gay, sex-positive psychotherapist in New York City, conducts interviews…
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Why is the Department of Veterans Affairs Using a 1988 Definition of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is the country’s leading public health agency, other government entities are not always up-to-speed on the latest recommendations. That could explain why the Department of Veterans Affairs appears to be using a variation of the 1988 Holmes definition for chronic fatigue syndrome in…
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Can Functional Neurological Disorder Be an Indication of Prion Disease?
A recent article in the Journal of Neurology presents a twist on the issue of functional neurological disorder (FND). The article, which was published in September, is called “Functional neurological symptoms as initial presentation of Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease: case series.” Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a prion disorder that leads to dementia and death, usually within months. But…
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A Stupid Study of Exercise for Long Covid Patients With Post-Exertional Symptom Exacerbation
The Journal of Medical Virology has just published a study called “Effect of using a structured pacing protocol on post-exertional symptom exacerbation and health status in a longitudinal cohort with the post-COVID-19 syndrome.” The investigators are from the University of Leeds and the Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust. Post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCS) is the name the…
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Is the Long Covid Phenomenon an Expression of “Psychosocial Distress”?
For the second time in a few weeks, a major US news organization has provided Professor Michael Sharpe, lead PACE investigator and one-time Virology Blog commenter, with a high-profile platform to disseminate his typical blather and nonsense. Both articles—the first in New York Magazine, the second in The New Republic–-have presented the long Covid phenomenon…
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Top Lightning Process Proponent Privately Lobbied for Approval of Norway’s LP Study
*Two corrections had been made in the text below. The NEM committee has 12 members, not nine, as I originally wrote. And when Dr Flottorp wrote her letter, it was not while the NEM committee was considering the proposed Lightning Process trial, as I originally wrote, but before it had progressed that far. The letter…
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Recent Articles in The Guardian, CNBC and Popular Science
As part of an ongoing project on long Covid, The Guardian recently published a powerful excerpt from a book called “What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma.” The author, Mike Mariani, is an American journalist who a decade ago found himself smacked with a debilitating case of chronic fatigue…
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The Long COVID Survival Guide and the Role of Patients in Research
“The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next—Stories and Advice from Twenty Long-Haulers and Experts” is pretty much what it sounds like. The anthology was published earlier this month, and each chapter is written by one or more contributors. The topics covered address long Covid through a variety…
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More on that New York Magazine Piece Pushing Psychogenic View of ME/CFS and Long Covid
So getting back to that long, ill-informed and poorly reported New York Magazine article on the purportedly psychogenic nature of both long Covid and ME/CFS…I responded in a twitter thread to the article’s misrepresentations of my criticisms about the PACE trial. The journalist, a science writer named Jeff Wise, didn’t interview me. But he did…