Trial By Error

Category: ME/CFS

  • Tack’s Take on BMJ’s CBT-Music Therapy “Feasibility Study”

    I have always made it clear that I pay attention when smart patients assess bad research. That’s how I stumbled into this whole mess in the first place–by reading what patients were writing about the PACE trial. (In that case, I at first dismissed the concerns when I read about how participants could get worse…

  • My Letter to Peer Reviewer of BMJ’s CBT-Music Therapy Paper

    I have recently written a few posts–here, here and here–about a study in BMJ Paediatrics Open that appears to be marred by multiple methodological and ethical problems. This is certainly not a one-time occurrence when it comes to BMJ journals. Last week, I sent a letter to the study’s senior author inviting him to send me his response…

  • My Letter to Senior Author of Norway’s CBT-Music Therapy Study

    In the past week, I have written three posts about a Norwegian study of cognitive behavior therapy plus music therapy for adolescents with chronic fatigue after acute Epstein-Barr virus infection–an illness known as mononucleosis in the US and glandular fever in the UK. The corresponding author of the study is Vegard Bruun Wyller, a professor…

  • Norway’s Double Whammy of Fuzzy Science

    Norway’s got a double whammy going on. First there’s the group of investigators that seems to have had trouble determining whether their newly published research on CBT and music therapy was an actual randomized trial or merely a feasibility study. (More on that below.) Then we have Dagbladet, a widely read tabloid, promoting a new…

  • More Strangeness with that Norwegian CBT/Music Therapy Study

    In a well-designed clinical trial, the protocol, the registration and the statistical analysis plan should complement and not contradict each other. Investigators spend huge amounts of time developing clinical trial protocols. These are road-maps to the project, complete with (hopefully) well thought-out and clearly defined primary and secondary outcomes. These documents have to pass muster with…

  • More on that Norwegian CBT/Music Therapy Study

    UPDATE, MAY 16: As I mentioned, the trial registration did not cite “recovery” as an outcome. However, the various study documents include a number of different statements about the status of physical activity, fatigue, and recovery as endpoints. Of four relevant documents besides the trial registration, one included the definition of recovery used in reporting…

  • Today is May 12th and Everyone’s Missing

    Today, May 12th, is International Awareness Day for Chronic Immunological and Neurological Diseases (CIND)—often shortened to International ME (or ME/CFS) and Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. Besides ME, other diseases included in the CIND group, per the May 12th International Awareness Day site, are chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome and multiple chemical sensitivity. The date was…

  • Valerie Eliot Smith on COVID-19, ME and Legal Repercussions

    I met Valerie Eliot Smith a year or so before I published my 15,000-word investigation of the PACE trial. As an experienced lawyer familiar with how libel and related torts are handled in the UK, she provided invaluable advice on legal issues. (She and her husband also suggested the name “Trial By Error,” for which…

  • Merck Manual Still Disseminates GET/CBT Advice

    The graded exercise therapy/cognitive behavior therapy treatment paradigm for chronic fatigue syndrome—also imposed on those diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, CFS/ME, ME/CFS, and other variants–is like the undead. This concept keeps reemerging from the fetid intellectual swamplands that spawned it, no matter how many times it is revealed as nonsense. Although the US Centers for Disease…

  • My Letter to IBS Study’s Corresponding Author

    I am slowly getting back to my efforts to highlight Mahana Therapeutics’ continuing misrepresentation of its new web-based cognitive behavior therapy program for irritable bowel syndrome. In January, the start-up company that it had licensed the program from King’s College London, based on a high-profile study published last year in Gut, a BMJ journal. The…

  • Norway’s Proposed Lightning Process Trial

    Last year, Archives of Disease in Childhood slapped a 3000-word correction on a University of Bristol study of the Lightning Process. The lead investigator was Bristol’s ethically and methodologically challenged pediatrician, Professor Esther Crawley, who failed to disclose to the journal that the study had violated core scientific principles. As I have previously stated, the…

  • Oxford Health’s Response to My Freedom of Information Request

    A few weeks ago, the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust posted a pamphlet about coronavirus and fatigue that could have been written by the GET/CBT ideological brigades in the 1990s. It was attributed to–or blamed on?–a mysterious entity called the “psychosocial response group.” No information about these psychosocialists was available on the trust’s website, as…