Trial By Error

Year: 2020

  • Update on BMJ’s CBT-Music Therapy Study (h/t Steinkopf and Tack)

    I have written multiple posts this year about a Norwegian study of cognitive behavior therapy plus music therapy as a treatment for chronic fatigue after acute EBV infection (aka mononucleosis and glandular fever). The study, published in April by BMJ Paediatrics Open, was rife with methodological and ethical flaws. It should not have been accepted in the…

  • The Science Media Centre and UK’s Coverage of New NICE Draft

    As Trump’s legal team continues to spout nonsense rather than acknowledge that the orange balloon lost the election, core members of the UK’s biopsychosocial ideological brigades are also engaged in embarrassing denialism. Last week, a draft of new ME/CFS clinical guidelines issued by a key British health agency advised against graded exercise therapy and cognitive…

  • Jennie Spotila’s Annual Review of NIH Funding

    Every year, Jennie Spotila posts her analysis of annual funding for ME from the US National Institutes of Health on her invaluable blog, Occupy M.E. (On the other hand, Occupy Me is a 16-minute gay drama from 2015 about an interlude between two guys. I have no idea if it’s any good, but looks promising!)…

  • NICE Draft Rejects GET, Lightning Process, and CBT-As-Cure

    The draft of the new ME/CFS guidance from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is out–posted just after midnight, London time, on Tuesday, November 10. This is the headline: The draft represents a repudiation of the GET/CBT paradigm and the deconditioning hypothesis. Here are key take-aways: *Graded exercise therapy, other interventions based…

  • With Trump Out, Can GET/CBT Be Next?

    I have often described the logic demonstrated by the biopsychosocial ideological brigades as Trumpian in nature. Like the fat loser about to be expelled from his big home in Washington, D.C., this cabal of British experts have long relied on “alternative facts”—in their case to promote graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavior therapy as effective…

  • My Predictions for NICE ME/CFS Guidance, Reprise

    UC Berkeley’s crowdfunding campaign ended successfully last Saturday–thanks, all!!–but I haven’t managed to get much done in the news-filled week since then. I was prepared to have to join the resistance in the hills around the Berkeley campus, but now that has become unnecessary. Whew! Now that I no longer have to worry about the…

  • No Links Between “Parental Separation” and Kids’ ME Severity

    When last heard from, Terry Segal, a pediatrician at University College London, was the senior author of a 2019 review of pediatric treatments for what she and her colleagues called “CFS/ME.” The review was published in Current Opinion in Pediatrics, a high-impact journal. The abstract for the review singled out the Lightning Process as having…

  • BMJ Retracts Music Therapy-CBT Study, But…

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 I have written many posts this year about a Norwegian study of cognitive behavior therapy plus music…

  • The British Association for CFS/ME Switches Gears

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 On October 20th, the British Association for CFS/ME issued a document titled “Position Paper on the management…

  • NICE’s Upcoming Draft Guidance on ME/CFS

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, is planning to release a draft…

  • Professor Chew-Graham’s Apparent Shift in Position on GET/CBT

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 Carolyn Chew-Graham, a professor of general practice research at Keele University in Staffordshire , is a longtime…

  • Some Thoughts on Long-Covid, ME/CFS and MUS

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 Among the troubling phenomena to emerge from the pandemic are the reports from so many Covid-19 patients…