Trial By Error

Year: 2017

  • The CDC Drops CBT/GET

    This is the beginning of a new phase for “Trial by Error.” I initially assumed that my work on PACE and ME/CFS (or ME, or CFS/ME, or CFS) would be a one-off investigation, and then I’d move on to other projects. But after my 15,000-word series was posted on Virology Blog in October of 2015,…

  • Guest Post: Questions About Professor Sharpe’s ‘Special Ethics Seminar’

    by Steven Lubet On 1 June 2017, Professor Michael Sharpe presented the “Special Ethics Seminar” at Oxford University’s St Cross College. In his posted abstract, he asserted that “some areas of scholarship are politicised (U.K. spelling in original),” including “the role of psychiatric or psychological approaches in the treatment” of ME/CFS patients. Sharpe also likened ME/CFS…

  • More on Graded Exercise from Peter White and The Lancet

    [June 30, 2017: This post has been corrected and revised.] Professor Peter White and colleagues have published yet another study in The Lancet promoting graded exercise as an appropriate intervention for the illness they refer to as “chronic fatigue syndrome” but that is more appropriately called “myalgic encephalomyelitis.” (Two compromise terms, ME/CFS and CFS/ME, satisfy…

  • Is PACE a Case of Research Misconduct?

    [June 25, 2017: The last section of this post, about the PLoS One study, has been revised and corrected.] I have tip-toed around the question of research misconduct since I started my PACE investigation. In my long Virology Blog series in October 2015, I decided to document the trial’s extensive list of flaws—or as many…

  • University of Bristol Responds, Sort Of

    Last week, I e-mailed a letter to Sue Paterson, director of legal services at the University of Bristol, to express my concerns about Professor Esther Crawley’s false claim that I had libeled her in reporting on her research for Virology Blog. On Friday, I received a two-sentence response from Ms. Paterson. She addressed it to…

  • My Letter to the University of Bristol

    This morning I e-mailed the following letter to Sue Paterson, the University of Bristol’s Director of Legal Services and Deputy University Secretary, to protest Professor Esther Crawley’s accusation that I libeled her in blogging about her work. I cc’d the office of the university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Hugh Brady. Dear Ms. Paterson: I have recently learned…

  • Julie Rehmeyer’s Journey “Through the Shadowlands”

    In February, 2011, I wrote a bad article about the PACE trial. At that time, I was reporting on the XMRV situation and had never heard about this piece of crap. As happens at news organizations, my editor at The New York Times sent me the Lancet paper and asked me to write it up…

  • My “Tear It Up” Talk at Invest in ME

    First, since I’m in London at the moment, I need to say that it feels weird and even wrong to be posting about PACE-related issues right after Saturday night’s terrible events. But in our fked-up world, life goes on for everyone else, including ME/CFS patients, and my job is to report this stuff, and so…

  • David Tuller’s Fundraiser

    If you appreciate the articles written here on ME/CFS, please consider supporting him financially at Crowdrise. David is an investigative reporter with a doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. Since the fall of 2015, David has waged a determined effort to expose the methodological and ethical problems with the PACE trial for ME/CFS.…

  • ME Research UK Drops Out of CMRC

    I have spent two weeks hammering the CFS/ME Research Collaborative about “Renal-gate”—that is, vice-chair Esther Crawley’s recent lecture at a conference of kidney disease experts, in which she falsely accused me of writing “libellous blogs.” The CMRC’s chair, Stephen Holgate, recently assured me that Dr. Crawley had the “full support” of the executive board—a statement…

  • The CMRC Affirms Full Support for Libelous Esther

    For the last couple of weeks, I have been hammering the CFS/ME Research Collaborative to take a position on the actions of its deputy chair, Libelous Esther—better known as Dr. Esther Crawley. As I reported in several previous posts, Dr. Crawley falsely accused me of writing “libelous blogs” and Dr. Racaniello of posting them. To…

  • CMRC to Virology Blog: “F**k Off!”

    Well, not in those words, of course. It was all very polite. But that was the message. Here’s what happened. On Monday, I posted an open letter to the members of the board of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative. The letter involved the false accusation of libel that the CMRC’s deputy chair, Esther Crawley, disseminated against…