Year: 2021
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An Exchange of Letters Concerning Professor Chalder’s Latest Disaster of a Paper
Last week, Brian Hughes and I sent a letter to Occupational Medicine, which recently published yet another of Professor Trudie Chalder’s awful papers. Among other problems, Professor Chalder and her four co-authors completely misstated their own findings in the text of the paper. We called for retraction of the paper. In the past, I have…
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Mayo Clinic Treatment Plan Cites “Deconditioning,” “Perfectionism,” and CBT
The renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has a poor record when it comes to ME/CFS. It has a history of pushing the graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) approach outlined in the now-discredited PACE trial. These interventions were based on the notion that the symptoms were perpetuated from a mish-mosh of…
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A Letter to Occupational Medicine From Brian Hughes & Me About Prof Chalder’s Latest Disaster
Members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades produce a gusher of dreck, and I don’t bother commenting on most of their work. Life’s too short. So it can be easy to lose sight of how flawed and truly awful each individual paper can be. But even among this flood of scientifically deficient research, a recent paper…
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More on that Disastrous Employment Paper from Professor Chalder and Colleagues
A few days ago, I wrote a post about yet another atrocious paper from Professor Trudie Chalder—this one called “Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status: a retrospective longitudinal study.” Professor Chalder and her colleagues seem constitutionally incapable of writing anything that isn’t marred by massive flaws. In this case, as I noted the other day,…
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Professor Chalder Messes Up Again in New Paper on CFS and Employment Outcomes
Same-Day Update: In re-reading the new paper, I noticed that the discussion section also features errors involving the percentages. It includes this sentence: “About 9% of individuals who were not working at baseline had returned to work at follow-up.” And this one: “Further, 6% of those working at baseline were no longer working at follow-up.”…
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Lightning Process Star Complains About NICE; Struthers Nudges Cochrane to Keep Up
Another Anti-Science Campaigner Takes Aim at NICE The anti-science zealots do not give up easily. Now Live Landmark, the Norwegian Lightning Process practitioner, has written an opinion piece blasting the new evidence-based guidelines for ME/CFS from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). I assume she is not just upset that the document…
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An Interview with Adam Lowe, a Member of the NICE Guideline Committee for ME/CFS
Adam Lowe, a patient, was one of five lay people on the committee pulled together by Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to work on the new ME/CFS guideline. He and I spoke recently on Zoom about his role in the […]
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New Paper From PACE Authors Repeats Bogus Arguments and Defenses
The October 29th publication of the new guideline for ME/CFS from Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) represented an enormous and humiliating repudiation of the PACE trial and the many related studies of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) as treatments for the illness. That means it also represented…
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Some National Health Service Branches Fail to Respond to New NICE Guidelines for ME/CFS
In late October, the UK’s National institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released its new ME/CFS guideline, which specifically recommend against graded exercise therapy (GET) and a specialized form of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). Last week, I wrote about how King’s College London continues to host a page on “CBT and chronic fatigue syndrome,”…
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Is Something Shifting at the Science Media Centre?
For years, London’s Science Media Centre has fiercely promoted research into graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for the illness or cluster of illnesses variously referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephaloymyelitis, CFS/ME, ME/CFS, and other names. Some of the prominent experts in this field have had close relationships with this…
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Authors Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt and Nasim Marie Jafry Discuss Their Novels
It is hard enough to write when you’re feeling healthy. So I’m in awe of people who manage to write despite suffering from a debilitating chronic illness—especially one that messes around with cognitive functioning. That number includes some ME patients who have written novels. (I don’t write fiction; I have a hard enough time keeping…
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King’s College London Is Still Hyping “Bespoke” CBT for CFS as “Recommended” in UK
A week ago, Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published its new, evidence-based guideline for ME/CFS, which recommended against graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavior therapy offered as curative rather than as supportive care. Not surprisingly, this event creates some public relations problems for members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades, who have spent…