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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Northwestern Law Professor Steven Lubet Corresponds with McMaster U. About That WSJ Op-Ed
A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece accused an apparently powerful “queer feminist wellness collective” of causing an international wave of mental illness, which is being expressed as reports of persistent disabling symptoms after an acute bout of COVID-19. The article was written by a psychiatry resident at Canada’s McMaster University in Canada. Given the…
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Letter to Lancet Editor Demanding Independent Investigation of PACE (Reprise from 2018)
*April 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/25504 In August, 2018, I organized an open letter…
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My Letter to Professor Anthony David Asks Why MUS Experts Keep Misquoting a Major Study
Earlier this week, I wrote to the journal Psychological Medicine about a significant mistake in a paper on functional neurological disorders. The mistake involved a misquotation of Bermingham et al, a key 2010 analysis of the National Health Service costs associated with care for working-age people found to be “somatising.” One of Psychological Medicine‘s two…
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PACE Team’s Work for Insurance Companies Is “Not Related” to PACE. Really? (Reprise)
When I first investigated the PACE trail in 2015, one of the features most shocking to me was the investigators’ blatant violation of a core human rights document that they had promised in their protocol to adhere to. That violation of the Declaration of Helsinki involved their failure to tell study participants about their close…
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The World According to Sharpe
*April 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/25504 Poor Professor Michael Sharpe. The distinguished psychiatrist from…
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Jennie Spotila Tracks Down–and Busts–an Old Tale About “Death Threats” from Patients
In early 2011, the first report of the PACE results in The Lancet drew widespread criticism from patients and advocates. Later that year, stories about unhinged, anti-science patients harassing and threatening leading researchers in the field appeared in high-profile UK outlets like BMJ and The Times. In the UK, this appears to have been orchestrated…
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A Letter to Psychological Medicine about Error in MUS Paper from Sir Simon and Colleagues
I have previously documented that some of the leading experts in “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS) have regularly misstated a core finding from a seminal study in their field. The study—”The cost of somatisation among the working-age population in England for the year 2008–2009”—was published in 2010 in the journal Mental Health in Family Practice. The…
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Journal of Health Psychology Publishes Hughes-Tuller Critique of Wessely-Chalder CBT Claims
What kind of researchers would publish obviously misleading figures about their favorite intervention in a study abstract? And who would make causal claims in a paper while simultaneously pointing out that the study design does not allow for causal claims? Well, it seems Professor Sir Wessely and Professor Trudie Chalder, along with three of their…
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Prof Sharpe Fact-Checks Comment on Blog About How George Monbiot Is Causing Long COVID
*April 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/25504 In a surprising development, Professor Michael Sharpe has…
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Guardian Columnist George Monbiot Is Causing Long COVID, Says Professor Michael Sharpe
*April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 In a remarkable display of—well, I’m not even sure what to call it–Professor Michael Sharpe has blamed…
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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…
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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…