Trial By Error

Year: 2021

  • Losers in NICE Guideline Fight Remain Defiant Despite Public Repudiation of Their Claims

    *For more about the significance of the new NICE guideline for ME/CFS, the blog ME/CFS Skeptic has this excellent summary. Also, psychologist Brian Hughes covers the deep concerns of leading medical groups that the guideline recommends against the Lightning Process. It is not surprising that esteemed experts whose research has been publicly exposed as a…

  • NICE Liberates New ME/CFS Guideline After Two-Month Hijacking Nightmare

    After much drama, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has finally liberated its hijacked ME/CFS clinical guideline. As many know, in August the agency abruptly called off the planned publication of this new document, which was developed over four years. This decision occurred in the wake of fierce objections from members and…

  • PACE Authors Now Blame “Misunderstandings” for GET/CBT Criticisms

    It is hard to know what to make of the news that a peer-reviewed journal has actually accepted a PACE-reunion paper from the three lead investigators—Professors Michael Sharpe, Trudie Chalder, and Peter White. Even more so for a paper titled–without irony, it seems–“Evidence based care for people with chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis.” This…

  • NICE Announces Upcoming Release of ME/CFS Guideline After Prolonged Hostage Drama

    Two days following a high-profile meeting with opponents and supporters of its new-but-still-unpublished ME/CFS guideline, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence announced on Wednesday that it plans to release the document next week. The decision comes after a powerful cabal of medical practitioners held the process hostage for two months with unwarranted…

  • Advocates Issue Hopeful Comments After NICE Pow-Wow on ME/CFS Guideline

    Two months ago, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) abruptly delayed publication of its new ME/CFS clinical guideline under fierce objections from the GET/CBT ideological brigades and their minions. Today (Monday, October 18th), the agency hosted a meeting to allow these powerful dissenters from some of the British medical associations grandly…

  • North Bristol NHS Trust’s Biased Survey of Patients Attending “CFS/ME Specialist Services”

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/27513 Two years ago, the North Bristol NHS…

  • Professor Lubet’s Take on The New Yorker’s Long Covid Article

    I wrote a post last month about the recent wave of Long Covid coverage—some of it excellent (The Atlantic) and some way over the edge in its assertions of psychogenic causation of symptoms (The American Spectator, Spiked). Then there was the seemingly sympathetic New Yorker article by a physician, with its more subtle form of…

  • UC Berkeley’s October Crowdfunding Campaign

    When I launched the Trial By Error project in 2015 with a 15,000-word investigation of the piece of crap known more formally as the PACE trial, I had no idea I was launching anything. I figured it was a one-off. After all, could such a disaster of a study really survive the sort of in-depth…

  • BBC’s Problematic Coverage of New Long COVID Study

    Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting an equivalence between COVID-19 and influenza has been a consistent approach among those seeking to downplay the current situation. So it’s not surprising to see something similar happen with comparisons between Long COVID and the delayed recovery some people experience after an acute bout of the flu.…

  • Good Long Covid Coverage from Atlantic; Skeptical Coverage from New Yorker and Others

    On September 1st, The Atlantic published another excellent piece by Ed Yong—“Long-haulers are fighting for their future.” In exploring how this population has confronted widespread misunderstanding in the medical community, the article highlighted the links between the experiences of Long Covid and ME/CFS patients by focusing on the crucial symptom of post-exertional malaise. That led…

  • Advocates Propose Fixes to Dysfunctional US Coding System for ME, CFS and ME/CFS

    I have been focused lately on the continuing saga of the hijacked-and-still-unpublished ME/CFS clinical guidelines (HSUME/CFSCG) from Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The fate of the HSUME/CFSCG will apparently be addressed at an October so-called “roundtable” meeting of NICE and representatives from relevant interest groups. (I’m not sure what makes it…

  • An Updated Letter to the NICE Chief Executive About the Unpublished ME/CFS Guideline

    I sent the following letter today to Professor Gillian Leng, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). It was a follow-up to the letter I sent on September 1st about the agency’s decision to delay publication of it new ME/CFS guidelines. The letter has now been signed by more than…