Trial By Error

Year: 2022

  • Does Functional Neurology Disorder Account for a Third of Outpatient Neurology Consults?

    Functional neurological disorder, or FND, is the new-ish name for the hoary Freudian construct known as conversion disorder. For decades, psychiatrists informed patients that they were “converting” their emotional distress and anxieties into physical symptoms like tremors, seizures, sensory and cognitive deficits, a halting gait, or other physical dysfunctions. The impossibility of proving such claims…

  • A Reprise of an Earlier Blog Post About Godwin’s Law on Nazi Analogies and Simon Wessely

    In a new book, Fiona Fox, the head of the London-based Science Media Centre, has compared critics of the GET/CBT ideological brigades and the PACE trial to Nazis, as I noted recently on Virology Blog. In response to her unfortunate reference to the Holocaust in this context, some on social media have invoked the popular…

  • Science Media Centre Chief Fiona Fox Compares ME/CFS Patient Advocates to Nazis

    I have called the PACE trial of graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for ME/CFS “a piece of crap.” As I have indicated over the years, I think the trial is an example of serious research misconduct. (Whether it meets legal definitions of “fraud” is beyond my professional expertise, but I wouldn’t…

  • Deja Vu All Over Again with Proposed Lightning Process Study in Norway

    It’s déjà vu all over again in Norway with the Lightning Process (LP). Earlier this month, a national research ethics authority, NEM, postponed a decision on a proposed LP trial until at least June. The trial has already been approved by a regional committee. The NEM had been expected to decide at its May meeting…

  • An Innumerate Response from Chalder to Hughes-Tuller Comments on Bogus Data Analysis

    Last year, King College London’s professor of cognitive behaviour therapy, Trudie Chalder, published another one of her extremely incompetent papers. This one is so statistically challenged as to be truly mind-boggling, even by Professor Chalder’s extremely low standards. A team of purportedly expert researchers has mangled descriptions of their own  data so badly that the…

  • Speaker at CDC Event Promotes CBT and “Very Gradual” GET

    The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a long history of missteps when it comes to the illness or cluster of illnesses currently called ME/CFS—as anyone who has read Osler’s Web knows. In the more recent past—2017–the agency dropped its unfortunate endorsement of the discredited GET/CBT treatment approach but made no public comment…

  • An Interview With Mt Sinai’s David Putrino About Long Covid, ME/CFS, and Related Issues

    David Putrino is a neuroscientist and physical therapist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He runs a research lab and a rehabilitation center that quickly became a magnet for patients grappling with what has come to be known as long Covid–what the US National Institutes of Health calls post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). We…

  • Now a Scottish Long Covid Study Fails to Mention the Risk of Post-Exertional Malaise

    *April 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/31347 And here’s another major trial designed by investigators who think that an exercise program might be the optimal strategy for treating the complex grab-bag of…

  • Two Reports on the Financial Burden of Long Covid and Its Impact on ME/CFS Prevalence

    *April 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/31347 It is clear that long Covid—however that term is defined–is having enormous impacts on employment, social benefits, disability insurance, and other domains. Even the coronavirus…

  • An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of “The Invisible Kingdom”

    *April 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/31347 Last Friday, I interviewed poet, journalist and editor Meghan O’Rourke about The Invisible Kingdom, her insightful and affecting memoir of living with chronic illness. As…

  • The UK Health Research Authority’s Missteps on PACE and the Declaration of Helsinki

    *April 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/31347 *Note: To give credit where it’s due, Magical Medicine: How to Make an Illness Disappear, an exhaustive investigation from Malcolm Hooper and Margaret Williams, first…

  • PACE Team Stages a Comeback Tour

    *April 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/31347 Professors Peter White, Trudie Chalder and Michael Sharpe seem to have embarked on what could be called the PACE Rehabilitation Tour. This is an apparent…