Trial By Error

Year: 2017

  • NIH Grants $2.1 Million to UK Biobank!

    The National Institutes of Health is making a $2.1 million grant to the UK ME/CFS Biobank–a huge endorsement of this important project run by CureME and housed at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Here’s what the ME Association wrote on its website: “The funding represents the biggest ever single investment in biomedical…

  • NICE Rejects Current Guidance, Plans “Full Update”

    Let’s give credit where it’s due. Apparently someone with decision-making authority at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has a grasp on reality and is willing to challenge the claims of the biopsychosocial ideological brigades. That’s the only logical explanation for last Wednesday’s welcome but unexpected announcement that the agency would pursue…

  • MEGA’s Latest Failure

    In his welcome talk at last week’s annual conference of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative (CMRC), the chair, Professor Stephen Holgate, praised his colleague and second-in-command, Professor Esther Crawley, for her “stunning” and “amazing” work on the group’s main research initiative. There was just one problem: That initiative, the ME/CFS Epidemiology and Genomics Alliance (MEGA), had…

  • The NICE “Topic Expert” Reports

    My first recent freedom of information request to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was for information about the experts consulted in the current process of reviewing CG53, the 2007 guidance for the illness the agency calls chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis. In its response, the agency explained that seven topic experts had…

  • Seeking More Details on Crawley School Absence Study

    This morning I sent the following freedom of information request to Bristol University. My friend and colleague Steven Lubet, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, joined me in making this request. Professor Lubet is an expert on legal ethics, among many other fields, and in July he guest-blogged here about the purported “ethics”…

  • No Ethical Review of Crawley School Absence Study

    This is a complicated post. Here are the key points. The rest is details: *Professor Esther Crawley and co-authors claimed a 2011 study in BMJ Open was exempt from ethical review because it involved the routine collection of data for “service evaluation.” Yet the 2011 study was not an evaluation of routine clinical service provision–it…

  • My E-Mail Exchange With NICE Chief Executive

    On Friday, I had an e-mail exchange with Sir Andrew Dillon, chief executive of the NICE Guidance Executive. The other seven Guidance Executive members are various directors within the NICE hierarchy, including the communications director. This group will make the final decision about whether to accept the provisional decision of a NICE surveillance review team…

  • Retired PACE Investigator Peter White and Swiss Re

    On November 17, 2015, a few weeks after publication of my 15,000-word investigation of the PACE trial, I posted a blog about a talk Peter White gave to Swiss Re employees on the findings from his bogus study. Professor White, of course, was the lead PACE investigator and also served–and apparently still serves–as “chief medical…

  • The Science Media Centre’s Desperate Efforts to Defend PACE

    This week, the Journal of Health Psychology published a special issue containing a raft of commentaries on the PACE trial. Most of them slammed the study for its many, many unacceptable flaws. Not surprisingly, Sir Simon Wessely’s lackeys at the Science Media Centre immediately posted three comments from “experts” lauding the trial and criticizing the…

  • NICE Rejects My FOI Request

    The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the U.K. organization that develops clinical guidelines for medical conditions, has rejected my freedom-of-information request for the names of the experts involved in the reassessment of the guidance for the illness it calls CFS/ME. This isn’t surprising, since the agency also recently rejected similar requests from the…

  • NICE Declines to Disclose Names of Experts

    The Countess of Mar, a well-known advocate for ME/CFS patients in the House of Lords, has received a negative response to her request for the names of the experts involved in the review of the NICE guideline for CFS/ME. The ME Association has not yet received a response related to the same question, nor have…

  • The NICE guidelines, and more on the CDC

    This month, the U.K. organization currently assessing whether to update the clinical guidelines for the illness it calls CFS/ME is seeking input from “stakeholders” in the process. Unfortunately, that’s not good news—it’s bad news. Why? The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, is an independent body that operates under the sponsorship of…