Matthew Hotopf is a professor of general medicine psychiatry at King’s College London. He served as a peer-reviewer for a study by Bristol University investigators that was published in BMJ Open in 2011. The study involved whether school absences could be used to identify cases of diagnosed CFS/ME (as the study called the illness). As…

Update: When I posted earlier today, I also meant to update what was happening with the exercise review. On March 8, Cochrane announced, through a notice appended to the review, that the authors would submit another revision in May. (Cochrane has already rejected a previous revision submitted last fall.) That is also the month when…

Over the years, I’ve slammed U.S. medical and health care institutions that have championed the GET/CBT treatment paradigm for the illness or cluster of illnesses variously known as ME, CFS, ME/CFS or CFS/ME. I have done this both before and after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed its own recommendations for the…

Boy, it’s hard to keep up with all the stupid studies coming out! But that’s no reason not to take a look at a couple of them. (In both cases, I’m just making a few comments. Much more could be said about each of these studies. You can read more about them on the Science…

Update (later on March 4): Because Royal United Hospitals Bath suggested that I “redirect” my request for documents back to Bristol University, that’s what I did. Earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Bristol’s director of legal services. Here’s what I wrote: As you likely remember, I have raised concerns about a number of studies…

In January, I wrote about the problematic online training course developed by the Royal College of General Practitioners and touted by Steve Brine MP as addressing the “misconceptions” about ME (or CFS/ME, as the online course calls the illness). The lead author of the course was Carolyn Chew-Graham, a professor of general practice research at…

The situation at Cochrane appears to remain fluid. Last week, the organization posted a notice that it is seeking a new editor-in-chief. The current occupant of the position, Dr David Tovey, is leaving in May. Dr Tovey has been at Cochrane for a decade, so this move could easily have been a long-planned departure. Since…

This morning, I sent the following message to Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of The BMJ and editorial director of BMJ. The subject heading: “My remaining concerns…” Dear Fiona— Thank you for the quick changes to Nigel Hawkes’ BMJ news story about the UK Heath Research Authority’s letter on the PACE trial. I appreciate the addition…

After this month’s release of the Health Research Authority’s PACE analysis, Professor Michael Sharpe sent e-mails to at least two US publications requesting a retraction or major correction of critical articles. Professor Sharpe’s e-mails accused the writers involved of suggesting that PACE was “fraudulent.” This accusation was not true. In both cases, the writers had…

Because of various developments in the UK and elsewhere, I’ve neglected goings-on back home. I’m working on a couple of things now but in the meantime I decided to post something typically insightful that Jennie Spotila published last week on her blog, Occupy M.E. It’s a frustration with this project that I don’t have the…

I thought it might be helpful to re-post a list of questions I wanted to ask Professor White and his PACE colleagues in September, 2015–more than a month before Virology Blog posted the first installment of “Trial By Error: The Troubling Case of the PACE Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study.” I originally posted this list on…

Added Feb 12: I realized today that I wanted to add a couple of details. The new version of the BMJ article about the Health Research Authority analysis of PACE includes this sentence at the bottom: “Correction notice: On 8 February 2019 a new version of this article was posted with clarifications added.” For unexplained…