Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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Psychologist Brian Hughes Discusses His New Book, “A Conceptual History of Psychology”
My friend and colleague Brian Hughes, a professor of psychology at the University of Galway in Ireland, recently published his latest book—“A Conceptual History of Psychology: The Mind Through Time.” Rather than dating the field of psychology to the creation and growth of university departments of psychology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, […]
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Dutch CBT Study for Long Covid Reports Proves that Unblinded Studies with Subjective Outcomes Generate Positive Reports
Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about a problematic Dutch study that had been funded by a major health agency and was being led by Hans Knoop, a professor of medical psychology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. The study sought to test whether a course of cognitive behavior therapy starting months after a […]
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Questions About the Prevalence of Functional Neurological Disorder and the Research on Hoover’s Sign for Functional Leg Weakness
(This is a long-ish post. Sorry! It covers two complicated issues. I want to thank an intrepid source for help with this.) I have great sympathy for patients diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND). Their symptoms can be seriously disabling and their plight has long been neglected and dismissed by the medical establishment. When I […]
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A Day in the Life of Anil van der Zee
It is May 12th–ME International Awareness Day. (Or ME/CFS International Awareness Day if you’re the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Washington, DC, #MEAction and Body Politic have organized a protest and press conference “to demand bold, urgent governmental action for the millions of people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), Long COVID, and […]
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Mt Sinai’s David Putrino on Long Covid and Functional Neurological Disorder
David Putrino is a neuroscientist and physical therapist at New York’s Mt Sinai Health System, where he is director of rehabilitation innovation. Over the last three years, he has worked extensively with patients experiencing prolonged symptoms after an acute bout of Covid-19, or what has become known as long Covid (LC). Last spring, I interviewed […]
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“Long Haul” Author Ryan Prior on Why Long Covid Is a “Political” Term and Related Stuff
Last month, The Nation published a wide-ranging overview of the impact of long Covid on the United States by Fiona Lowenstein and Ryan Prior. Called The Long Covid Revolution, the article proposed a number of steps for addressing the fallout and highlighted the critical role of grass-roots patient movements in pushing for change. Lowenstein is […]
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Dutch Agency Awards Big Biomedical ME/CFS Grant to Judith Rosmalen, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine
On Tuesday, ZonMw announced the first grant recipients in its program of “biomedical research on ME/CFS”—the initial round of awards from the €11.6 million allocated for the 10-year effort. I wrote on Monday about the resignation earlier this month of a patient representative involved in the grant-making process, a move that raised concerns about the […]
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Dutch Agency to Announce ME/CFS Research Awards After Committee Resignation of Key Patient Advocate
ZonMw is an independent Dutch organization that receives significant government funding for a variety of healthcare-related research projects. On April 25th—tomorrow—it is expected to announce the recipients of €11.6 million in grants for ME/CFS research. This announcement regarding ZonMw’s ME/CFS program is the result of a lengthy process that began ten years ago with a […]
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Some Recent Long Covid Articles from STAT/MuckRock, The Atlantic, and Nieman Reports
STAT and MuckRock co-publish investigative report slamming NIH’s RECOVER initiatve Earlier this month, I wrote about the problem of exercise studies for long Covid that were failing to adequately address the issue of post-exertional malaise—including an announced project being funded by the National Institute’s of Health’s much-ballyhooed RECOVER initiative. Now STAT, the health and medical […]
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Professors Crawley, Chalder & Colleagues Investigate Pediatric Long Covid in Yet Another Study with a Stupid Acronym
No human being should ever have to read as many papers as I have from Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician, and Professor Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s statistically and factually challenged cognitive behavior therapy specialist. Most recently, I had to ask the UK’s Health Research Authority to track down why […]
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Why Did the NIH List an Award for Research on Cancer-Related Fatigue in Its List of Spending on ME/CFS?
Each year, the US National Institutes of Health publishes its “estimates of funding for various research, condition, and disease categories.” These estimates are provided in a lengthy table with the figures calculated “based on grants, contracts, and other funding mechanisms used across the National Institutes of Health.” For many years, the amount reported to be […]
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Further Thoughts on that JAMA Network Open Article and Estimates of Long Covid Prevalence
Last week, I wrote two posts–here and here–about a new Norwegian study in JAMA Network Open that was essentially designed not to find differences in the prevalence of prolonged symptoms in patients with and without coronavirus infection confirmed by PCR. The study reported that almost half of the sample in both the PCR-positive and PCR-negative […]