Year: 2018
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A Letter to BMJ Open
Three weeks ago, Professor Racaniello e-mailed a letter of concern to Archives of Disease in Childhood about its recent study of the Lightning Process as a treatment for ME/CFS in kids. The journal’s editor, Dr. Nick Brown, answered within an hour, assuring Professor Racaniello that he took the matter seriously and that the journal would…
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QMUL and FOI; Nature and Cochrane; the Pineapple Fund
Queen Mary University of London seems to have devised a fail-safe method of avoiding having to comply with more PACE-related freedom-of-information requests—just declare no one is around who can deal with it. Earlier this month, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office issued a decision in an appeal of QMUL’s rejection of a FOI request. The ICO…
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Letter to British Journal of Sports Medicine from CPET Experts
Last October, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a short paper that was essentially a summary of Cochrane’s systematic review of graded exercise for chronic fatigue syndrome (as Cochrane calls the illness). This systematic review is problematic for a number of reasons—not least of which is that it includes the debunked PACE trial and…
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A Letter to Archives of Disease in Childhood
Earlier today, Professor Racaniello e-mailed the following letter to Nick Brown, the editor-in-chief of Archives of Disease in Childhood, one of the journals from the BMJ Group. Archives recently published a study of the Lightning Process in kids with ME/CFS. Dear Dr. Brown: In September, Archives of Disease in Childhood published a study called “Clinical…
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Professor Crawley’s Bogus BuzzFeed Claims
Tom Chivers’ terrific article on the Lightning Process and Professor Esther Crawley’s SMILE trial in the Archives of Disease in Childhood has received a lot of attention and comment. I wanted to respond to the short sections in which Professor Crawley seeks to justify her methodological choices. Here are the relevant passages: In the highest-quality…
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My Six-Month Review
This month is the start of the second half of my one-year crowdfunding commitment to keep reporting on ME/CFS, so I figured I should review what I’ve done so far, what I still hope to do, and what changes have taken place during the last six months. So, here goes. From July 1st through December…
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COPE to BMJ Open: More Details, Please!
Yesterday I reviewed an account of a publishing dilemma that had been submitted to the forum of the Committee on Publication Ethics. The COPE forum offers advice on thorny situations submitted anonymously by members. In this case, the submission appeared to be from BMJ Open and it appeared to be discussing Professor Esther Crawley’s school…
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The School Absence Study, Revisited
This post is about a serious issue–ethical approval for research studies involving children. It is also about how powerful institutions, like leading medical journals, respond to concerns. But the story is really too long and complicated. I recommend it only for those following things pretty closely or who for whatever reason like this kind of…