Year: 2023
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Further Thoughts on that JAMA Network Open Article and Estimates of Long Covid 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/37217 Last week, I wrote two posts–here and here–about a new Norwegian study in JAMA Network Open that was essentially designed not to find differences in…
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What is Recovery Norway’s Role in the JAMA Network Open Study of Long Covid in Young People?
*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/37217 As I wrote earlier this week, a new study of adolescents and young adults from Norway, published by JAMA Network Open, purports to show…
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New JAMA Article Seeks to Revive the Zombie Case Definition for CFS from 1994
The long Covid narrative seems to bounce back and forth with each new study or review documenting contrasting findings—evidence of serious pathophysiological anomalies among sub-sets of patients followed by data that appear to implicate psychological and/or emotional factors in the generation of reported symptoms. A new study in JAMA Network Open falls in the latter…
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Why Are Exercise Studies for Long Covid Still Failing to Address PEM Adequately?
Note: I posted this on March 29th, and for some reason it disappeared from the site–so I am reposting it today. I have written previously about the issue of exercise studies for long Covid patients. As with the discredited PACE trial for the illness or cluster of illnesses currently being referred to as ME/CFS, the…
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What the Hell is Going on with Cochrane’s Long-Delayed Re-Review of “Exercise Therapies”?
What is going on with Cochrane’s much-delayed re-review of exercise therapy for the illness the organization is these days calling ME/CFS? It is more than three years since Cochrane announced plans to develop this completely new review, but no one outside the organization seems to have much idea of what’s happening with that project. Maybe…
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GET/CBT Ideologues Revive 1991 Oxford Criteria as Core Definition for Long Covid Research
The Collaborative on Fatigue Following Infection, or COFFI, was formed in 2015 to promote the theories and treatment approaches embodied in the now-discredited and arguably fraudulent PACE trial and related research. In a nutshell, PACE and related research promoted the notion that the symptoms of patients with the clinical entity or entities variously called chronic…
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An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of The Invisible Kingdom (Reprise)
Last April, I interviewed poet, journalist and editor Meghan O’Rourke about The Invisible Kingdom, her insightful and affecting memoir of living with chronic illness. The book, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, has just been issued in paperback. So I figured I’d re-post the interview. As the book recounts, O’Rourke initially…
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After Maeve Boothby O’Neill’s Death, More Concerns About Severe ME Patients at NHS Hospitals
I recently wrote an article for Codastory.com about Maeve Boothby O’Neill, who died from complications of severe ME in October, 2021, after three separate admissions to her local National Health Service hospital in Exeter, England. During her hospital stays, she and her family fought with the hospital over the need for tube-feeding or an alternate…
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An Upcoming “Biopsychosocial” Long Covid Conference in Finland
What is it with the health care establishments in northern Europe? Why are they so devoted to non-evidence-based approaches to treating serious medical conditions? Why do they trust arguably fraudulent research, like the PACE trial and Professor Esther Crawley’s pediatric Lightning Process study? Why are the authors of these studies respected and even esteemed among…
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Correctives from Putrino & Iwasaki (and Others) to the Long-Covid-Is-Psychosomatic Claims
When the pandemic began, everyone involved in the ME, CFS, and ME/CFS domain assumed that there would be a wave of post-acute, prolonged complications, since every virus seems to leave in its wake a small but still significant number of people who report a range of non-specific symptoms. It was also widely predicted that many…
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Once More Regarding Inflated FND Rates–and a Reprise of a Letter to a Yale Neurologist
Last July, I sent a letter to Benjamin Tolchin, a neurologist at Yale, about the statement, in a 2021 paper for which he was the lead author, regarding prevalence rates for functional neurological disorder (FND). Last month, I sent it again. I’ve still had no response. I am reposting it below because related claims about…