In the News.

Not me, but my condition.
In a nice, confusing BBC article.
Chronic fatigue syndrome: Brain training is most cost-effective treatment
(not so much confusing to someone who doesn't know enough: the more you know, or think you know, about CFS /ME, the less clear and the more ill-defined the article becomes.

Enough to make one, or at least me,  think hard, even when I should be resting.
Describing CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as "brain-training" is bad enough: it gives the impression you just need to play some of these "improve your IQ" computer games.

That's before what isn't stated, that there is very good, good, indifferent, bad, and downright harmful CBT, depending on the practitioner, their technique, experience and mindset.
I've experienced some of the range of it in my time, connected with my Asperger's and depressive illness.
A lot can go wrong if an unhelpful paradigm is lodged in the *practitioner's* head.

Not quite the article's fault, but part of the confusion (and argument) comes from different groups using the same words with different  meanings.  Not helpful for someone who is ill (and doesn't have tons of energy any more to investigate and assess) and wants the best advice, and not quackery or medical in-fighting.

This article has had me thinking too much (given fatigue issues)today.  About epistemology, essentially.  Who can you trust for information, to know that it is reliable?
I caught my parents lying to me about Father Christmas when I was five or thereabouts: traumatic.
Later it was teachers, text-books, history as "popularly understood".
I learned to cope, but also not to trust unthinkingly.

My CFS is  different from getting my Asperger's diagnosis, though.
I don't have the resources to study, research, evaluate now, the way I did then.  Everything is tiring.
Even reading.
I live with a thousand friends who are losing their ability to communicate with me.

So "tearing into" the topic of CFS as I did with autism (350+ pages of solid information absorbed in a weekend) is not now an option.
Another in the catch-22 family, I suppose.

I've gone direct, and sent an e-mail to one of the professors named in the article.  That was a good proportion of my "five minutes an hour" used up for today.
Time will tell if it was time well spent.

In one sense I'm not short of the stuff: I'm not exactly going anywhere, just at the moment.
But at five minutes in the hour *top* speed, things happen slowly, and even small things clamour for their share of limited active time in the day.

This blog's interesting, there. Tiring on the eyes somewhat, but restful on the mind.