🧵Serious Red Flags for the #CISCO21#LongCovid Study
Researchers please listen to patients concerns & expand your knowledge to the history of #MECFS
You have a chance to stop patient harm
1. No mention of #PEM#PESE in the literature
After repeatedly asking if they screen for #PEM or take this into account - they have not responded in the affirmative.
This is the nub of the issue
75% of #Longhaulers have #PEM
46% are eligible for an #MECFS diagnosis
This means that our bodies cannot process exercise - think sugar diabetes
There is no magic where by giving us exercise because we can't do it means we will magically be able too
They are taking those who are not just Deconditioned through a hospital stay & you need to be exercise impaired to be eligible for the study. This means you will highly likely have PEM & be at risk
The basis of the study is on muscle weakness and wasting - a Deconditioning model. This is out of date and can't be treated with exercise - please look at #MECFS research
The rationale for the study is there is a gap in therapy. There is a gap in therapy because there had been no decent research - you fill the gap by doing this research in pathophysiology & treatment.
We are losing count of the number of rehab exercise studies
Look at #MECFS
The Shuttle Walk test is genuinely dangerous as its aim is to push someone to their limits.
Serious danger to relapse, worsening of symptoms and #PEM
The study visits are exercise based and the treatment is exercise based. This is seriously risky and giving people the false hope they will get better and be tempted to push through to get better.
Potential Risks - this is not true, please do your research. You are not only likely to feel as bit tired for a short time. You can be pushed permanently to a more severe state of illness. This has happened time and again in #MECFS
2033 Completion date?
Here are the details to make a complaint
This is essentially researchers meaning well but not having done their homework It works from a Deconditioning model that there is muscle wastage and if you fix that then you fix the problem.This doesn't work as our anaerobic metabolism doesn't work. That is what you need to fix
There is a chance that if someone has been in hospital and it's Deconditioned but recovered and doesn't have PEM then this may be of benefit. But you are not only doing this and expanding it to all with #LongCovid without a safety net or way to report harm.
1️⃣ Visible Health has launched a local clinical trial feature. One of the first surfacing to users is an ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) trial led by Trudie Chalder, a researcher whose work has been highly controversial in ME. This raises important patient-safety concerns.
2️⃣ Chronic illness patients, especially ME and Long Covid, have a long history of harm from behavioural framing, invalidation, and psychological treatment paradigms being presented as disease-modifying. For many, this is not theoretical. It is lived trauma.
3️⃣ Visible currently pulls trials automatically from & displays them directly in the app without contextual notes. Ethics-board approval is not a guarantee of clinical appropriateness for a vulnerable illness population
It's International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
To mark this we are looking at ways to help those house-bound or bed-bound with Long Covid or chronic illness with vital screening & testing. /1
🧵👇
Cervical cancer screening via self-sampling is coming soon to England’s national programme: people overdue for smear may receive a kit in the post allowing HPV testing at home. /2
🖇️ gov.uk/government/new…
🧵1️⃣ It’s UK Budget Day - so here’s a budget #RachelReeves hasn’t announced: a proper Long Covid Budget. We've estimated the real economic burden of Long Covid at £12-15 BILLION A YEAR.
At a £ a minute that puts us back in 26,500 BC - the Late Upper Paleolithic 😳
#Budget2026
2️⃣ 📈 According to the European Journal of Health Economics (2025), around 2 million people in the UK report Long Covid - c. 3% of the population. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
3️⃣ 👩🔧 LOST EARNINGS
NIHR summary: Long Covid has caused an average drop in earnings of £10,929 per person among people referred to specialist clinics. evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/how-much…
🧵#CLoCK Update
New paper released on #longcovid paediatric fatigue that demonstrates UK research culture has not made the vital steps needed to meet need or understand the disease.
Let's critically assess the issues: /1
They found that 61.6% met the CFQ (Chalder Fatigue Scale 😳) case-ness.
🔹35% at 3 months
🔹40% at 24 months
Higher risk = female, older c.15yrs, reported learning difficulty
This demonstrates that #longcovid research predominantly risks misrepresentation for young women.Why?/2
The key issue is the persistent use of the term fatigue. THERE IS NOT ONE MENTION OF PEM.
Fatigue as an umbrella term is misleading. It is a heterogeneous term that enables other issues to be conflated into Long Covid. /3
1/ 🧵 New perspective: Maybe all those yoga classes aren’t fixing fatigue… turns out, in ME/CFS & Long COVID, we may not be stuck in fight/flight at all. 🧘♀️
Cort Johnson summarises a new model suggesting low brain norepinephrine (NE) is central to symptoms.
2/ In this view by David Goldstein & Lilian Aregawi: The sympathetic nervous system isn’t overactive - it’s struggling. Low NE vesicle levels in the locus coeruleus → high neural “firing” but low output → “wired but tired”. 😵💫
3/ Symptoms line up: alertness and anxiety (“wired”) yet low energy, poor recovery, orthostatic intolerance - exactly the “high noise / low gain” scenario described. 🛌 healthrising.org/blog/2025/11/1…
Thread:
🚨 Long Covid and ME voices are being quietly hidden on X.
Let’s talk about what’s happening - and what we can do together to push back. 🧵
1️⃣ Over the past months, many advocacy accounts have seen posts vanish from feeds, searches, or hashtags. Follows have dived.
This isn’t a glitch - the algorithm de-prioritises health and advocacy content, especially when it includes links or repeated hashtags.
2️⃣ For a small non-profit or disabled advocate, that means hours of work can reach only a handful of people.
While misinformation spreads easily, lived experience and evidence-based advocacy are quietly filtered out.