Year: 2025
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BMJ’s Strange Response to Our Letter of Concern Regarding “Living Systematic Review” of Long Covid Interventions
In December, I sent a letter, co-signed by 18 colleagues, to The BMJ‘s editor in chief, Dr Kamran Abbasi. The letter requested a correction to a problematic study called “Interventions for the management of long covid (post-covid condition): living systematic review.” According to this review, there is “moderate certainty evidence” that a physical and mental…
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A Reprise of a 2018 Post on My Visits with Alem Matthees
In 2018, I spent six weeks in Australia, visiting multiple cities on a kind of ME/CFS tour around the country. Near the end, I spent five days in Perth. The local patient and advocacy organization arranged for me to give a talk, do some lobbying with local government, and so on. But my main motivation…
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Our Presentation at the University of New South Wales
On Tuesday, I gave a presentation at the Kirby Institute, a renowned research center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, along with my friend and colleague Dr David Joffe, a respiratory medicine specialist. David spoke about the pathophysiology of Long Covid as well as the enormous economic burden of the disease. I spoke about…
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My 2018 Post on Andrew Lloyd’s Memory Lapses, Revisited
Yesterday, in Sydney, I gave a presentation at the Kirby Institute, a renowned research center at the University of New South Wales, along with my friend and colleague Dr David Joffe, a respiratory medicine specialist. David spoke about the pathophysiology of Long Covid as well as the enormous economic burden of the disease. I spoke…
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A Bogus Request for Corrections to Recent Post on a Long Covid Exercse Study
Zachary Grin is a physical therapist in New York City who specializes in functional neurological disorder. Over the years, we had what I considered a good-natured, generally respectful exchange of views. As a gay man, I felt empathy for him—he posted about having difficulties with his parents after he came out. But I blocked him…
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Australian Survey Seeks Input for New ME/CFS Guidelines
Australia’s National Medical Health and Research Council (NMHRC) recently released what it calls a “scoping survey” as a first step in developing new clinical practice guidelines for ME/CFS. The survey was posted online on February 21st; the deadline for responding is April 27th. The plan calls for the new guidelines to be published in three…
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New Hyped-Up Lightning Process Study from New Zealand
In January, the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care published a paper from New Zealand called “An audit of 12 cases of long COVID following the lightning process intervention examining benefits and harms.” It reads like a Lightning Process marketing effort cosplaying as an academic study. As a reminder, the LP is a mish-mash…
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Some Things I’ve Read Recently…
With so many people impacted by Long Covid and ME/CFS, it is impossible to keep up with all the non-academic articles, posts, and commentaries out there. The gusher of material is really overwhelming. Given that, sometimes it seems worthwhile to highlight a few things worth reading. (Note: Recommending something as worth reading should not be…
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Trudie Chalder Is Co-Author on Another Bad Exercise Paper
It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least universally acknowledged by smart researchers), that if the list of authors on an article includes Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s mathematically and factually challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy, then the article in question should most assuredly be expected to be short on, or utterly devoid of, intelligence and logical reasoning.…
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A Letter to Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief
This morning, I e-mailed the following letter to Dr Karla Soares-Weiser, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, about the decision to abandon a planned update of a review of exercise therapy for ME/CFS. (I cc’d Toby Lasserson, Cochrane’s deputy editor-in-chief.) That decision was made public in an abrupt announcement dumped on the patient community right before the Christmas holidays.…
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GET Ideologues Try to Rebut Muscle Abnormality Study–and Fail
It is a pleasure to read a pointed and effective smack-down of an ill-informed argument, especially when the argument is pushing the graded exercise therapy/cognitive behavior therapy (GET/CBT) paradigm for ME/CFS, Long Covid and related illnesses. That’s how I felt about the excellent rebuttal this week to a letter from some of the usual GET/CBT…
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Some Things I’ve Read Recently…in STAT, The Sick Times, Van Der Zee’s Blog
Embedding ME/CFS in NIH’s RECOVER initiative Ian Lipkin is a well-known professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and director of the Center for Solutions for ME/CFS, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). In a recent opinion piece for STAT, he and ME/CFS patient advocate Elizabeth Ansell, the founder and executive director of…