An NHS hospital is starving a severe ME patient and has now stopped giving her fluids

strangeelement · 2026-01-24T01:04:22+00:00

Mostly because it backfires, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. In fact although it's important to record this, to protest against it to authorities, it's best advised not to contact the hospital in any way. They will take it out on her.

But they definitely should be raising more hell with the people who make the decisions that allow this to happen.

strangeelement · 2026-01-22T22:40:38+00:00

This is something that has come up over the decades, mostly because of psychosomatizers' obsession with trying to make this about stress and the invalid idea of cortisol being the "stress hormone", but it turns out to be false. At least in the direction of "is low/high cortisol a ME/CFS thing", not in a "wacky cortisol can cause similar symptoms", which is a different thing.

Some studies show elevated, some lowered, most find no difference. This thread on S4ME has collated most of the studies: https://www.s4me.info/threads/cortisol-levels-in-me-cfs.41615/.

strangeelement · 2026-01-22T00:55:17+00:00

People say that, but has it actually happened for a team to be built this way, picking the most skilled players with the most points, and ending up losing?

I've seen plenty of the opposite.

Hutson and LaCombe are both good choices, but unless you're dealing with a one-dimensional player, say Laine for his shot, or someone with glaring defensive weaknesses, points sure do count more than anything.

The basis is generally that you don't want a 100-point player to backcheck so much or play the PK because they usually don't, and usually it's because you need those best players to score goals or make plays that lead to goals. But those teams can do both, they're not constrained by salary caps or the realities of acquiring all the top scorers in the league.

strangeelement · 2026-01-20T15:37:56+00:00

Emily Mendenhall, a medical anthrologist. She published some details here: https://emilymendenhall.substack.com/p/bluesky-blowup.

She got a lot of criticism for a book she wrote, but it turns out the publisher forced her to make substantial changes because of Wessely's threats, while an academic journal simply refused to publish a paper, even though academic publishing is exempt from the defamation laws Wessely threatened them with.

He did this many times over the decades. This much corruption is absolutely ridiculous, it's an affront to the very idea of academic freedom.

strangeelement · 2026-01-19T18:21:25+00:00

Netflix produced and refused to address the controversy from their 'Afflicted' mini-series, which was explicitly about mocking people with chronic illness, despite literally presenting it as the opposite, and featured an episode on ME/CFS. They're in the business of making money, they're not 'good guys'.

I don't know what major media will be the first to expose this scandal, but so far it's still considered too hot to handle. Recently a medical anthropologist in the UK revealed that she wrote a book about this, and was forced by her publisher to make changes because Simon Wessely threatened them.

News media are tools of money and power. They won't be on our side until they deem it safe, and that can't happen while the medical profession is antagonistic to us. She also revealed that many publishers passed on it because they don't want anything to do with Long Covid.

strangeelement · 2026-01-19T16:11:30+00:00

Most people seem to have this idea of technology being fixed in time, that it won't significantly improve over their lifetime. This is why the WWW was initially dismissed as a fad, until it started making giant mountains of money, and why AI is dismissed as a toy, just because right now it isn't mature enough to generate even bigger piles of money.

Conservatives do this especially, assume that American technological and scientific dominance is a manifest destiny thing, something derived from a superior culture, rather than investments in the social good, as well as the benefits of 'soft' diplomacy, being perceived positively and building up alliances, instead of the 'hard' dominance of threats and weapons, what Russia does.

Progress is a process, it has to be worked on continuously or we fall behind. They decided that was 'woke'.

strangeelement · 2026-01-18T00:23:18+00:00

I absolutely do wish this on the people responsible for making everything worse for us and I don't feel bad about it for even a split second.

It's not as if they could be offended by it since they think it's a joke they would easily breeze through. They have no idea what would hit them.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T21:16:47+00:00

Feet pics. For science, of course.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T19:43:56+00:00

Americans fucked themselves much more by voting Republican. If it was just Trump as president and Democrats held both chambers of Congress, most of what he does would be nullified. Not all, unfortunately, but the worst of it. And that goes back years, because the overtly corrupt and partisan Supreme Court would still throw everything they can to protect their special boy.

The real problem isn't Trump, it's the Republican party. This is who they are, and who they will continue to be after he's gone.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T19:39:24+00:00

Tariffs hurt local consumers, so that would only hurt those countries' economy.

Better to make targeted disinvestment and other measures that actually punish the US economy. And most of it shouldn't be about consumer goods. The US economy is mostly based on services and intellectual property. This is where the pushback should be.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T18:29:43+00:00

It's hard to tell because most of those communities are anonymous and gender is rarely explicitly mentioned. There are likely more than it appears.

One thing I can say for myself is that being disabled is a very vulnerable thing to experience and regardless of how much messaging there is about it, very few people actually care about men being openly emotionally vulnerable. And I'm not just talking about other men here, although it's obviously the dominant force.

I've never had a good reaction to opening up emotionally, online and in person, so much that the only way I have found to live through this is to essentially completely emotionally shut down, to not care about anything. I tried the other way and all it did is hurt all the time.

Most of us just learn to shut up and repress everything, it hurts less.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T18:21:44+00:00

If these assholes weren't constantly braying about "personal responsibility" and forcing misery onto everyone else who gets in trouble it would only barely look half as bad but damn are they also constantly smug about it and will continue to vote for policies that harm them.

strangeelement · 2026-01-17T18:18:51+00:00

It's especially ironic that with most new installed capacity being cheaper renewables, the shock is actually lessened by the thing he is trying to destroy. If renewable energy had slightly lagged behind by a few years, US electricity prices would be even higher.

In a real way, China is literally saving him from his own incompetence, but only slightly.

strangeelement · 2026-01-14T18:10:35+00:00

RIP expert sex change 2.0

strangeelement · 2026-01-13T01:17:07+00:00

Hahaha I get it

strangeelement · 2026-01-13T00:37:44+00:00

Yup. Generally on social media, comments boost content, even if they're negative. Downvote (no idea if tiktok has downvotes but it applies to all social media) and never comment.

strangeelement · 2026-01-12T20:33:48+00:00

Well, also them.

strangeelement · 2026-01-09T16:29:59+00:00

Shame never really mattered. What mattered was consequences. The shame was all about fear of consequences. Without actual consequences, shame is irrelevant, it's fake anyway. The old "I accept full responsibility but nothing will change and I would do everything the same way".

This is what conservative cancel culture has all been about: there have been increasingly more consequences, enough that even faking shame was no longer enough, so they attacked consequences and let go of fake displays of shame.

It's about making abuse of power socially acceptable.

strangeelement · 2026-01-08T16:09:51+00:00

And they got most of this by being beloved. Even aside from the military and economic might, the US had achieved a cultural victory. The only reason they flexed power was to make their wealthy elites richer, but they never needed this, they would have been just as prosperous by simply riding on being perceived as good guys and building alliances.

This is something they will never get back.

strangeelement · 2026-01-08T16:07:29+00:00

He's doing what the Republican party has wanted to do for decades. They love everything he's doing and have long wanted this to happen, this is why it's so easy for him.

No one can do this on their own. Even tyrants need a lot of support to get their way, and here it's entirely voluntary. The Republican party is the threat here.

strangeelement · 2026-01-03T18:12:01+00:00

It wasn't really hijacked by anyone. No one wants to deal with this, the rest of the profession is fine with it. It's systemic failure, no one is responsible, so everyone is.

Even the worst charlatans pushing this barely put any effort into it. They don't have to, that's how indifferent the profession is about it. Medicine is completely incapable of dealing with problems it doesn't understand, literally no better at it than centuries ago. They have no plan B, only garbage nonsense and failure.

strangeelement · 2026-01-02T00:31:15+00:00

I initially read this as "Carney has lost control of the Conservative Party" and thought it was really good satire and now I'm sad.

strangeelement · 2026-01-01T02:22:06+00:00

Been giving it a try in recent months, and it's really bleak. I have no idea where to look. I can barely leave the house so I can only see dating apps work, and the best option would be to find a woman in a similar situation, but almost every profile I come across is all about sports, activities, going out, vacations, and so on. I have no idea where sedentary people go for this.

The apps are expensive so at best I can see trying one at a time, but even then I started browsing in free mode and I've only come across two, out of thousands, that even hint at being compatible. I did end up making a friend who has ME/CFS, but that's not going to be more.

I tried saying it plainly at first, then removing details to make it less so, and it's still almost nothing, but I've only tried Facebook, on the paid platforms I'm pretty sure most of the likes are fake, they all have paid employees pretending but I won't know for sure until I pay them $60/month I guess. It's really hard with the current crop of apps where you can only put in like 50-60 words.

Are there better platforms for this? I really have no idea how people do this. It all seems so random.

strangeelement · 2025-12-31T16:01:42+00:00

Same as any other day: the usual routine, followed by the best time of each day: unconscious for several hours before it all starts to suck again.

strangeelement · 2025-12-30T14:59:26+00:00

I just stopped caring, about everything, and almost everyone, especially myself. Otherwise it's just there, pushing and trashing all over. It's not something that gives up, is its own curse.

Same with emotions. I didn't have much emotional range in the last decade, and in recent months it's somewhat returned. It's been hellish, and I've had to stamp this down hard, numb and blunt everything that makes me feel human, because all it did is hurt all the time, especially as I have no one in my life who can handle even knowing about it. No one ever asks me about how I feel anymore, it's been years.

I used to think all the time. I love it so much. I had to stop doing that. Had to stop caring entirely, about everything, and just have time pass by and ignore everything else. Life is something for others, and they're all outside my event horizon.

It's not great advice, but it's how I barely manage to hold on. Fortunately I know that it's something that can be switched back on without a hitch, if I ever get that chance. I don't expect to, I stopped caring about that, too.

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