Year: 2022
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Usual Suspects Say NICE Made Eight Errors; Nonsense, Says Committee Member Adam Lowe
Update Jan 5, 2023: Martin Rücker, the German investigative journalist who posted the snippets from the draft article, touched base after seeing this post and assured me that the copy he received was not a formally embargoed version provided to reporters before publication. In other words, no embargo was broken, as I had assumed might…
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Can Functional Neurological Disorder Be an Indication of Prion Disease?
A recent article in the Journal of Neurology presents a twist on the issue of functional neurological disorder (FND). The article, which was published in September, is called “Functional neurological symptoms as initial presentation of Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease: case series.” Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a prion disorder that leads to dementia and death, usually within months. But…
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A Stupid Study of Exercise for Long Covid Patients With Post-Exertional Symptom Exacerbation
The Journal of Medical Virology has just published a study called “Effect of using a structured pacing protocol on post-exertional symptom exacerbation and health status in a longitudinal cohort with the post-COVID-19 syndrome.” The investigators are from the University of Leeds and the Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust. Post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCS) is the name the…
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Is the Long Covid Phenomenon an Expression of “Psychosocial Distress”?
For the second time in a few weeks, a major US news organization has provided Professor Michael Sharpe, lead PACE investigator and one-time Virology Blog commenter, with a high-profile platform to disseminate his typical blather and nonsense. Both articles—the first in New York Magazine, the second in The New Republic–-have presented the long Covid phenomenon…
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Top Lightning Process Proponent Privately Lobbied for Approval of Norway’s LP Study
*Two corrections had been made in the text below. The NEM committee has 12 members, not nine, as I originally wrote. And when Dr Flottorp wrote her letter, it was not while the NEM committee was considering the proposed Lightning Process trial, as I originally wrote, but before it had progressed that far. The letter…
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Recent Articles in The Guardian, CNBC and Popular Science
As part of an ongoing project on long Covid, The Guardian recently published a powerful excerpt from a book called “What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma.” The author, Mike Mariani, is an American journalist who a decade ago found himself smacked with a debilitating case of chronic fatigue…
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The Long COVID Survival Guide and the Role of Patients in Research
“The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next—Stories and Advice from Twenty Long-Haulers and Experts” is pretty much what it sounds like. The anthology was published earlier this month, and each chapter is written by one or more contributors. The topics covered address long Covid through a variety…
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More on that New York Magazine Piece Pushing Psychogenic View of ME/CFS and Long Covid
So getting back to that long, ill-informed and poorly reported New York Magazine article on the purportedly psychogenic nature of both long Covid and ME/CFS…I responded in a twitter thread to the article’s misrepresentations of my criticisms about the PACE trial. The journalist, a science writer named Jeff Wise, didn’t interview me. But he did…
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Recent News Articles Highlight Post-Exertional Malaise
A few prominent news articles have recently drawn welcome attention to the links and overlaps between ME/CFS and long Covid. One key overlap is the core ME/CFS symptom generally known as “post-exertional malaise” (PEM). This term is so embedded in conversations in the ME and ME/CFS worlds that it is easy to forget others outside…
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Norwegian CBT/GET Ideologues Take Aim at Critics Who Reject Their Views
[*See correction in third paragraph] Three Norwegian researchers recently published an attack on critics of cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy as treatments for ME. The article, called “Facts and Myths about ME,” was published by the news organization Aftenposten. The authors, from the Scandinavian arm of the CBT/GET ideological brigades, asserted that “the…
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The 7th Anniversary of My Expose About the Fraudulent–i.e. Misleading, Deceptive–PACE Trial
*October is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error: project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/33528 This month marks the seventh anniversary of Virology Blog’s publication of my 15,000-word investigation of the egregiously flawed and fraudulent (i.e. misleading, deceptive) piece of…
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German Draft Report on ME/CFS Raises Alarms for Promoting CBT and GET
The European ME Coalition (EMEC) has published a statement about and an analysis of a recently released report about ME/CFS from a Germany agency, the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). With EMEC’s permission, I have re-posted the statement in full below. The original post can be found here. The in-depth analysis,…