Trial By Error

Category: ME/CFS

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…