Senior Fellow in Public Health and Journalism, Center for Global Public Health, UC Berkeley. My academic position is largely funded by donations from patients. This account is an automatic WordPress-to-Fediverse feed; replies here will not be seen.
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Three CBT/GET Proponents Quit NICE ME/CFS Guidance Panel as Publication Date Nears
The new ME/CFS clinical guidance from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is finished—and is to be publicly released on August 18th. In the meantime, this final version has been sent to registered stakeholders—even as three of the 21 members of the committee responsible for the guidance have stepped down without…
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Neurology Journal Fixes False Claim in MUS Paper–But Fails to Publish a Correction Notice (Ironically, I Have Added a Correction to the Post!)
UPDATE: August 4, 2021 Dr Villemarette-Pittman, the managing editor of Journal of the Neurological Sciences, has informed me that she has learned from Elsevier that a corrigendum has in fact been written and will be published in the near future. She also informed me that she plays no role in deciding on or setting policy…
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Tack and I Write to Psych Medicine; Struthers Writes to Medical Research Council
A recent study of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for patients with “persistent physical symptoms” (PPS), a category alsocalled “medically unexplained symptoms,” reported null results for its primary outcome. These null results were not mentioned in the conclusion of the abstract, which instead focused on minimal reported benefits for a minority of secondary outcomes. This is…
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CBT Model of Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Explained; CBT Trial for Q-Fever Fatigue
As I have recently written, four major clinical trials of CBT for so-called MUS have documented the opposite of what the investigators hoped to prove. In fact, the evidence from this research suggests that CBT is not an effective treatment for these conditions. That hasn’t stopped these investigators from claiming otherwise, of course. As my…
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Medical Societies and new Komaroff-Lipkin Paper Highlight Long COVID and ME/CFS Links
While some medical professionals argue that prolonged non-specific symptoms after acute COVID-19 are psychogenic and that “Long COVID” as a presumed clinical entity was concocted by a cabal of queers and feminists, others are getting on with efforts to disseminate more appropriate information to their colleagues. These efforts often involve drawing parallels with the pathophysiology…
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Some Lightning Process Updates
A Final Round in Norway Lightning Process supporters got some bad news recently when a Norwegian national research ethics panel rejected a proposed study because it was poorly designed and fraught with conflicts of interest, as I wrote about here. But that wasn’t the end of the drama. Although the ethics panel’s decision was meant…
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Professor Steven Lubet on Misogyny, Homophobia and Long COVID Denialism
My friend and colleague Steven Lubet is a professor of law at Northwestern University. He and I have collaborated on a number of articles, including a response to Professor Michael Sharpe’s views on so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” in the journal Medical Humanities and a piece on links between ME/CFS and Long COVID for STAT. This…
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Professor White & Colleagues “Regret” Ignoring Null Results in GETSET Trial Follow-Up
Last week, I wrote about the correction made to the “Highlights” section of the paper reporting the long-term follow-up results for the GETSET trial. (The trial was conducted by Professor Peter White, one of the three lead PACE investigators, and colleagues.) I noted that this correction was not indicated or identified—a fact I attributed to…
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Quartet of Trials Reveals Limitations of CBT for “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”
A year ago, I wrote a post about how the biopsychosocial ideological brigades had completed a trifecta of major studies that investigated cognitive behavior therapy for a variety of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS). As a group, the studies demonstrated the overall ineffectiveness of CBT as a treatment for this category of disorders—despite herculean efforts…
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Journal Corrects “Highlights” of GETSET Paper; A Letter about Prof White’s GET Safety Paper
I have pressed the Journal of Psychosomatic Research to correct a recent paper—”Guided graded exercise self-help for chronic fatigue syndrome: Long term follow up and cost-effectiveness following the GETSET trial.” The senior author is Professor Peter White. Now the journal has published a revised “Highlights” section of the paper that accurately presents the study’s null…
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Lowenstein’s Guardian Opinion; Eliot Smith’s Post-NICE View; Tack’s Take on Blinding Study
The Guardian has published a lot of nonsense about Long COVID and has provided a platform for people who argue that robust manly thoughts are the path to recovery. Of course, it also published George Monbiot’s powerful columns on the topic, including his rebuttal of silly accusations that he was triggering more Long COVID cases…
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Did the IBS Trial Really Show that Web-Based CBT Offered Significant Clinical Effectiveness?
I wrote some posts last year about the ACTIB trial–a major study of telephone-delivered and web-delivered cognitive behavior therapy (TCBT and WCBT) for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Contrary to how the results have been framed by those with reputational and financial interests in promoting them, the study demonstrated that WCBT did not provide clinically significant…