Tag: australia
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A Reprise of a 2018 Post on My Visits with Alem Matthees
In 2018, I spent six weeks in Australia, visiting multiple cities on a kind of ME/CFS tour around the country. Near the end, I spent five days in Perth. The local patient and advocacy organization arranged for me to give a talk, do some lobbying with local government, and so on. But my main motivation…
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My 2018 Post on Andrew Lloyd’s Memory Lapses, Revisited
Yesterday, in Sydney, I gave a presentation at the Kirby Institute, a renowned research center at the University of New South Wales, along with my friend and colleague Dr David Joffe, a respiratory medicine specialist. David spoke about the pathophysiology of Long Covid as well as the enormous economic burden of the disease. I spoke…
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Australian Survey Seeks Input for New ME/CFS Guidelines
Australia’s National Medical Health and Research Council (NMHRC) recently released what it calls a “scoping survey” as a first step in developing new clinical practice guidelines for ME/CFS. The survey was posted online on February 21st; the deadline for responding is April 27th. The plan calls for the new guidelines to be published in three…
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Some Things I Read This Week–Scathing “Effort Preference” Analysis; Kids with Long Covid; National Academies’ Long Covid Definition
An in-depth pushback on “effort preference” When the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s long-delayed “deep phenotyping” study of a handful of ME/CFS patients was released earlier this year, the focus on a weird construct called “effort preference” sucked up all the attention–in part because the paper placed it front and center, in part because no…
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Australian GP Group Recommends “Incremental Physical Activity” for “CFS/ME” Patients
What’s going on with Aussie members of the graded exercise therapy cult? (Oops!—I meant the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, a trade and professional organization. Sorry!) In 2019, I wrote about the organization’s guidance for “CFS/ME.” This guidance, published in 2015, was part of the group’s Handbook of Non-Drug Interventions (HANDI). This month, HANDI…
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Awaiting Response on Chalder Paper; Australian GPs Still Promoting GET and Citing PACE
Last month, the journal Occupational Medicine published an innumerate article from Professor Trudie Chalder and several colleagues at King’s College London, called “Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status: a retrospective longitudinal study.” Professor Brian Hughes, a psychologist at National University of Ireland, Galway, and I alerted the journal of some disqualifying issues with the paper,…