Steve Chalmers

What's happening with Jimmy Kimmel is about politics and power.

When I got my first driver's license in Ohio in the early 1970s, parallel parking was half of the driving test, and it took a lot of practice to pass that test.

But before we got our licenses, we practiced in some deserted parking lot with poles as markers, not with people's cars on a real street!

...deposit on the lung surface, and pass at some rate through that surface, which means into the bloodstream (and out, as well).

My wife can "smell metals in the air" as a storm is coming in, the same conditions in which some people with old injuries feel them hurt again. MCS reaction. We stay in.

So if one treats the lung surface as simply a semipermeable membrane with molecules moving in both directions (which is necessary for nebulizers and the nice officer's breathalyzer to work), then humidity droplets in the air are small enough that those already dissolved metal salts will deposit...

This framing is completely at odds with how physicians and the public are taught to think about the blood/air barrier in the lungs

From an aerosol science or atmospheric chemistry perspective it's well understood that metal salts in aqueous form are ubiquitous in the air

part natural, part manmade

While it may have nothing to do with your experience,

Over the last 29 years since we all got sensitized in the same sick house incident

My wife, son, daughter, and self are affected to different degrees by weather, but it's not the temperature

I think it's what's dissolved in the humidity in air

just as policymakers (ie CDC and NIH) seem to have fallen to regulatory capture -- by emotional argument, not facts -- on ME/"CFS". as described in "Osler's Web" and her more recent "The Why"

The people driving the effort to deny/trivialize ME/"CFS" have shown their faces only twice in 40+ years

I have often wondered over the last 29 years if the preponderance of med school professors reminding med students patients lie/omit/misperceive isn't deliberately induced by such special interests (by emotional appeal to the professors, of course, not by bribes)

…peer reviewed medical literature for about US$10 million in less than a decade. For a bit more spent on unethical advocacy that basis can then be used to drive a coercive standard of care on physicians requiring that a physician make that anxiety/phobia/deconditioning diagnosis for such patients

It's far worse than class warfare

Special interests with large sums of money at stake (or their very existence at stake) can get disinformation written into the peer reviewed medical literature saying a particular condition is always, say, anxiety or phobia or deconditioning, written into peer...

…cannot possibly occur if the basic theory underlying medical practice and research today (ie what's taught in med school) is correct and complete

we wouldn't need medical research if it was

perhaps teach physicians that 1 in 3 patients have such conditions, don't dismiss their lived experience

A thought from a patient who, with his family, got what for lack of understanding by the medical profession I call Multiple Chemical Sensitivity from a sick house 29 years ago:

1 in 3 patients walk into clinic, or the ED, with a physical complex chronic condition which can't possibly occur if...

That said, as a retired computer designer who went to university only a decade after the last time AI overpromised and underdelivered, I don't think profligate use of electricity by AI data centers is good for society, and it's time to figure out how to do that work for 1/100th the electricity

…asking people to sacrifice, deeply, to save the planet would never win politically. There would always be a demagogue in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry who would convince people their sacrifice wasn't necessary

There's enough energy in the sunlight landing on our planet for everyone.

Two thoughts on this:

First, your observation is valid. We humans do need to use energy wisely rather than profligately.

Second, when my son was majoring in political science at Stanford 15ish years ago, he also became passionate about climate change. He realized that asking people to sacrifice...

Quite relevant, and I applauded it when first published

ME/"CFS" is only one (maybe two) of what I counted one day as two dozen complex chronic illnesses whose mechanisms medicine simply doesn't understand...

or simply cannot occur as patients experience them if current medical theory is correct

PACE seems designed to write into the peer reviewed medical literature conclusions which provide cover for payers of disability income to reject every claim for ME/"CFS" because it can be cured by exercise and a harsh talking to.

Methods were changed when the data did not support that conclusion.

PACE was not just paid for, but assisted in many ways, and had its results amplified, by a set of payers of disability income and their ecosystem of consultants, not just DWP in the UK, but worldwide.

Yes, this was a hard read.

I remain convinced S.W. is a vector for disinformation, not a scientist. A tool, not a principal.

My only question is, is he a prejudiced "true believer" being used by the special interests with $trillions at stake, or knowingly conveying their talking points?

taking the word "Chemical" out of the name stops pointing the blame for what's happening at the chemical industry

In the end, the renaming wasn't of much consequence. Flooding the peer reviewed literature with papers pointing to psych/anxiety causes created illusion of consensus. That was enough.

But think about it: the chemical industry wanted to insulate itself and its customers from lawsuits claiming that injury from chemical industry products had caused Multiple Chemical Sensitivity disability (sometimes total disability) in people

"Idiopathic" means we have no idea what causes it
and

The original members of the session all walked out when they realized they were outnumbered and the session was being hijacked, and history was of course written by the victors.

The influence of the nonprofit was sufficient that IEI was used as a neutral name for a decade or two after that

...hijacked a very small sub session -- a handful of people from around the world in a conference room for a few hours -- at a UN sponsored science conference, to use the name of that session as the origin of renaming "Multiple Chemical Sensitivity" to be "Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance"

A second point:

You are right about names. A set of advocates, working for or more broadly funded by grants or consulting fees from a nominal nonprofit funded by the chemical industry in the 1990s to "make Multiple Chemical Sensitivity go away" for litigation defense purposes, hijacked a...

Erik doesn't think much of my ideas and my own armchair activism. That's OK.

And he's so angry at science for its choice to work from selected facts and political hypotheses, rather than the messy facts on the ground 41 years ago, that he's hard to interact with.

But he's not getting any younger

I also think Erik has in his head a Rosetta Stone for a small set of "controversial" complex chronic illnesses which have baffled medicine and medical research for 50 to 100 years.

Not for the answers. But to learn which pieces of science and medicine consensus need work (frame the problems wrong)

I think there was a special interest, with a lot of money at stake, already manipulating the science during the debate which ultimately named "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome", pushed the "it's just fatigue" narrative to the public and more importantly practicing physicians and research policymakers

If you ever want to get first hand witness data, activist and firebrand Erik Johnson was a member of that cohort for which the name "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" was coined, and is apoplectic that the physicians/scientists on the scene 41 years ago discarded key facts which did not fit their hypothesis

A couple of observations you should be skeptical of, from a retired computer designer whose family suddenly got a "controversial" complex chronic illness when our sick house hit crisis 29 years ago.

First, the name Myalgic Encephalomyelitis was coined long before the Lake Tahoe cohort 41 years ago

That's enough motivation for a single private disability insurer to put a handful of people to work guiding the medical profession, policymakers, and the general public to disbelieve ME/"CFS" exists, and to disbelieve the lived experience of patients

I think that effort started 40 years ago