Trial By Error

Author: David Tuller

  • My Letter to BMJ Paediatrics Open About Missing Peer Reviews for Crawley Paper

    I recently noted that BMJ Paediatrics Open did not publish the peer review history of a 2021 study from a team led by Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet. The study (Clery et al) was titled “Qualitative study of the acceptability and feasibility of acceptance and commitment therapy…

  • If Professor Crawley’s ACT Study Was Peer Reviewed, Where Are the Peer Reviews?

    Yesterday, I wrote a blog about a just-published but already out-dated conference abstract from a team led by Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet. After I tweeted about it, I heard from Naomi Harvey, a zoologist, who said she’d written to BJPsychOpen about the abstract’s flaws. Hopefully, she—and…

  • Professor Crawley Promotes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for CBT Failures

    What is going on with Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet? And why is she still disseminating misguided views about treatments for vulnerable children? Haven’t kids suffered enough from the discredited claims of the GET/CBT ideological brigades? Just last week, the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust…

  • A Letter About the Inflated Prevalence Rate of Functional Neurological Disorder

    I have recently written two posts (here and here) about how experts in functional neurological disorder (FND) have a tendency to assert prevalence rates that ignore their own diagnostic criteria. Today I sent a letter to the corresponding author of yet another paper that has similarly engaged in this problematic strategy. I have posted the…

  • Sometimes Good Things Happen Quickly, Even When It Involves the UK National Health Service

    The new ME/CFS guidelines from the UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, published last October, reversed the agency’s previous recommendations for graded exercise therapy and (curative) cognitive behavior therapy. While this change presented a welcome repudiation of the research and claims emanating from the GET/CBT ideological brigades, many regional National Health Service trusts…

  • An FND Patient’s View–and More on Those Inflated Prevalence Rates

    In a post last week, I noted that experts in FND have a tendency to assert prevalence rates that ignore their own diagnostic criteria. Before offering further thoughts on that score, I want to make one point very explicit: I am in no way questioning whether people with the diagnosis have serious disorders and very…

  • 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…