Trial By Error

Author: David Tuller

  • Northwestern Law Professor Steve Lubet’s View of that Wall Street Journal Editorial

    I’ve already posted my thoughts about the ill-informed opinion piece by a psychiatrist-in-training that The Wall Street Journal published two weeks ago. The author’s dismissal of the Long COVID phenomenon as a result of delusions and mental illness elicited a lot of sharp responses online. The Wall Street Journal itself published a strong rebuttal from…

  • GETSET Study Reports Null Results for Self-Help Graded Exercise–but Declares Success Anyway

    The Journal of Psychosomatic Research (JSR), an influential publication. recently published an article that made a crucial point—in clinical trials, subjective outcomes are at “a greater risk of bias due to any unblinding.” The article, which I wrote about here, was authored by the journal’s current editor and two previous editors, both of whom are…

  • Long COVID, the Long COVID Alliance, and ME International

    The advent of Long COVID has brought an enormous amount of attention to the illness or cluster of illnesses collectively known these days as ME/CFS. That attention is not always positive, as we saw recently with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that dismissed both ME/CFS and Long COVID as forms of mental illness. The…

  • More on that WSJ Opinion Piece; and Q-and-A with Author of this Week’s WSJ Rebuttal

    Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a passionate but clueless opinion piece from a psychiatric resident at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The author, Jeremy Devine, portrayed the entire category now being referred to as Long COVID as a fiction foisted on the world by a committed commando of deluded and illness-obsessed queer feminists…

  • Clueless Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Endorses PACE as the “Prevailing View” Among Docs

    Long Covid stories and commentaries seem to be everywhere—too many to keep track of! This week, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece about long Covid and ME/CFS that is breathtakingly ill-informed—and more importantly, just wrong. Beyond that, it showed remarkable disrespect for patients and their experiences. (After this low for the WSJ opinion…

  • Another Excellent Read on Long Covid, ME/CFS and Medically Unexplained Symptoms

    In a post earlier this week, I noted some differences in the tenor of the debate over Long Covid in the US and UK. Yesterday, another excellent and in-depth piece on the issues appeared on the domestic front, this time in VICE. The author, Alan Levinovitz, is associate professor of religious studies at James Madison…

  • Biopsychosocial Brigades Seek Traction with Long Covid

    Last week, two major articles on long Covid appeared in well-known US publications—one in the Atlantic, the other in Vox. Like the New York Times Magazine article that ran in January, these stories addressed with nuance the complex and unclear relationship between the varieties of long Covid and the group of entities collectively known these…

  • Psychosomatics Journal Linked to PACE Authors Highlights Bias from Subjective Outcome

    The Journal of Pyschosomatic Research, a high-profile publication from Elsevier, has recently published an article relevant to long-standing arguments about trials that are both unblinded and reliant on subjective outcomes–like, say, the PACE study and related research into psycho-behavioral treatments for ME/CFS. This specific question–how to assess research quality when subjective outcomes are involved–is at…

  • A Q-and-A with Tracie White, author of The Puzzle Solver

    Tracie White, a science writer at Stanford University, first stumbled across the story of Whitney Dafoe as an assignment from one of her editors. That initial encounter ultimately turned into The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist’s Desperate Quest to Cure the Illness that Stole His Son, an account that Kirkus called “a complex, well-related story of…

  • National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on Plans for Long COVID Research

    The US government seems to be taking Long COVID seriously. In December, Congress allocated $1.15 billion over four years for research into the issue. This week, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, announced the agency’s plans for that funding. (I’ve posted his announcement in full below.) In a post last month he…

  • Happy Tenth Anniversary, PACE Trial!

    It’s been ten years since The Lancet published the first results of the PACE trial. Wow! Ten years ago, I was 54 and still a graduate student in public health at UC Berkeley. I was also busy writing stories for The New York Times about the mouse retrovirus study that had roiled the field of…

  • Hughes-Tuller Comment on Wessely-Chalder CBT Study Rejected by Journal, Posted Here

    Last fall, Professor Sir Simon Wessely and Professor Trudie Chalder were among several co-authors of a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The study purported to prove that years of provision of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to patients with “chronic fatigue” and “chronic fatigue syndrome” proved that the intervention was…