Trial By Error

Author: David Tuller

  • PACE Authors Now Blame “Misunderstandings” for GET/CBT Criticisms

    It is hard to know what to make of the news that a peer-reviewed journal has actually accepted a PACE-reunion paper from the three lead investigators—Professors Michael Sharpe, Trudie Chalder, and Peter White. Even more so for a paper titled–without irony, it seems–“Evidence based care for people with chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis.” This…

  • NICE Announces Upcoming Release of ME/CFS Guideline After Prolonged Hostage Drama

    Two days following a high-profile meeting with opponents and supporters of its new-but-still-unpublished ME/CFS guideline, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence announced on Wednesday that it plans to release the document next week. The decision comes after a powerful cabal of medical practitioners held the process hostage for two months with unwarranted…

  • Advocates Issue Hopeful Comments After NICE Pow-Wow on ME/CFS Guideline

    Two months ago, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) abruptly delayed publication of its new ME/CFS clinical guideline under fierce objections from the GET/CBT ideological brigades and their minions. Today (Monday, October 18th), the agency hosted a meeting to allow these powerful dissenters from some of the British medical associations grandly…

  • North Bristol NHS Trust’s Biased Survey of Patients Attending “CFS/ME Specialist Services”

    *October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/27513 Two years ago, the North Bristol NHS…

  • Professor Lubet’s Take on The New Yorker’s Long Covid Article

    I wrote a post last month about the recent wave of Long Covid coverage—some of it excellent (The Atlantic) and some way over the edge in its assertions of psychogenic causation of symptoms (The American Spectator, Spiked). Then there was the seemingly sympathetic New Yorker article by a physician, with its more subtle form of…

  • UC Berkeley’s October Crowdfunding Campaign

    When I launched the Trial By Error project in 2015 with a 15,000-word investigation of the piece of crap known more formally as the PACE trial, I had no idea I was launching anything. I figured it was a one-off. After all, could such a disaster of a study really survive the sort of in-depth…

  • BBC’s Problematic Coverage of New Long COVID Study

    Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting an equivalence between COVID-19 and influenza has been a consistent approach among those seeking to downplay the current situation. So it’s not surprising to see something similar happen with comparisons between Long COVID and the delayed recovery some people experience after an acute bout of the flu.…

  • Good Long Covid Coverage from Atlantic; Skeptical Coverage from New Yorker and Others

    On September 1st, The Atlantic published another excellent piece by Ed Yong—“Long-haulers are fighting for their future.” In exploring how this population has confronted widespread misunderstanding in the medical community, the article highlighted the links between the experiences of Long Covid and ME/CFS patients by focusing on the crucial symptom of post-exertional malaise. That led…

  • Advocates Propose Fixes to Dysfunctional US Coding System for ME, CFS and ME/CFS

    I have been focused lately on the continuing saga of the hijacked-and-still-unpublished ME/CFS clinical guidelines (HSUME/CFSCG) from Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The fate of the HSUME/CFSCG will apparently be addressed at an October so-called “roundtable” meeting of NICE and representatives from relevant interest groups. (I’m not sure what makes it…

  • An Updated Letter to the NICE Chief Executive About the Unpublished ME/CFS Guideline

    I sent the following letter today to Professor Gillian Leng, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). It was a follow-up to the letter I sent on September 1st about the agency’s decision to delay publication of it new ME/CFS guidelines. The letter has now been signed by more than…

  • More Science-as-Promotion from the GET Campaigners

    Professor Trudie Chalder, Professor Peter White and like-minded members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades have appeared desperate in the last year to promote their favored interventions, publishing one shoddy paper after another. This stream of sewage has seemed intended to influence the new ME/CFS clinical guidelines that Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence…

  • Jennie Spotila’s Annual Fact-Check of NIH Spending on ME/CFS Research

    There is a lot going on in the ME and ME/CFS world that I don’t get around to. That’s why I’m always grateful that Jennie Spotila always deconstructs the numbers on the annual spending claims from the National Institutes of Health. Last month, on her blog Occupy M.E., Spotila submitted the NIH’s 2020 numbers to…