Here is a transcript of my recent podcast with the Norwegian ME Association. In the interview, we discuss the medical stigma where post-viral illnesses, such as ME and Long COVID, are falsely characterised as ‘psychological’ due to poorly grounded stereotyping. The discussion touches on how medical opinion has become intertwined […]
COVID-19
ME, Long Covid, and the History of Medical Stigma (Podcast)
I recently had the pleasure of talking with the folks at the Norwegian ME Association for their (excellently produced) podcast series. Arising from my new book, we discussed the medical stigma in which an illness is falsely characterised as ‘psychological’ — post-viral conditions such as ME and Long Covid, for […]
Medical haste, COVID-19, and the mythology of “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”
Here is an extract from a lecture I gave last year for my colleagues at the Psychiatric Association of Turkey. It concerns the issue of so-called “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”: I attempt to show how the primacy effect — a reliance on first impressions — serves to distort medical reasoning. For […]
No, that antibody study does *not* show that Long COVID is caused by “beliefs”
The pandemic of Long COVID psychobabble continues. This week saw yet another terrible study claiming that long-haul COVID is just an illusion of human cognition, an illness-like experience rooted in psychological processes. The widely reported “finding” was published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine by a group of French […]
BMJ chooses face-saving over fact-checking
So last week, our friends at the BMJ published yet another ‘news’ item in one of the esteemed journal’s very-much-not-peer-reviewed sections. It carried a rather dramatic headline: Covid-19: Boys are more at risk of myocarditis after vaccination than of hospital admission for covid In a world swirling with anti-vaccination conspiracy […]
How illnesses become psychologised: Long COVID, ME, and the ‘All-In-Your-Head’ cartel
I was delighted to be part of this panel discussion on Gez Medinger‘s YouTube channel, RUN-DMC. As many readers will know, Gez is a London-based film producer and director who has been debilitated with severe Long COVID ever since contracting Covid early in the pandemic. His YouTube channel is now […]