Category: ME/CFS

On its website, Mahana Therapeutics has listed sixteen gastroenterology and psychology advisors from prominent academic and medical institutions. Companies often add such names to their rosters as a way of signaling their significance and their access to great minds. Sometimes these people are compensated; sometimes not. In many instances, these advisors play little role in day-to-day company…

Last week I wrote about the recently announced licensing deal between Mahana Therapeutics and King’s College London. The deal involves a web-based course of cognitive behavior therapy designed to treat irritable bowel syndrome. In a major study, the reported improvements in symptoms among participants in the web-based program were modest at best. Yet Mahana is…

As I wrote yesterday, Mahana Therapeutics has recently licensed from King’s College London an “innovative digital therapeutic”—a web-based program delivering a course of cognitive behavioral therapy to patients with irritable bowel syndrome. A page on the Mahana site promoting this web-delivered IBS-CBT program furthers the impression that this deal is steeped mostly in hype. A…

Yesterday I sent a freedom-of-information request to King’s College London about the recently announced licensing deal it has with Mahana Therapeutics. The deal involves a web-based CBT program for irritable bowel syndrome, which I have written about here and here. This morning I sent a note to the e-mail address for press contact listed on…

On January 10th, the following information was announced in a press release: Mahana Therapeutics, a digital therapeutics company reimagining the treatment of chronic diseases, today announced that the Company has entered into a licensing and collaboration agreement with King’s College London, a leading research university and one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in…

Had things gone as planned, the PACE trial should have been able to serve as proof that so-called medically unexplained symptoms (MUS)—in this case what the investigators referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome–could be successfully treated with psychological and behavioral therapies. The Lancet published the first PACE results, which reported benefits from cognitive behavioural therapy…

Last October, I gave a talk in Oxford (not AT Oxford) about the dung-heap known as the Lightning Process trial which was published in 2017 in Archives of Disease in Childhood, a BMJ journal. The study’s full name: “Clinical and cost-effectiveness of the Lightning Process in addition to specialist medical care for paediatric chronic fatigue syndrome:…

Since 2008, the National Health Service (NHS) in England has been rolling out a program known as Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). Initially focused on patients with mental health issues like depression and anxiety disorders, IAPT was then expanded to include those who are also simultaneously suffering from “long-term conditions” and so-called “medically unexplained…

In the UK, leading researchers are preparing to submit an application for a large genetic study to two major funding agencies. The project is being led by Professor Chris Ponting of the University of Edinburgh, who is also vice chair of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative, and the UK ME/CFS Biobank at the London School of…

It has been almost two years since BMC Psychology published a key reanalysis of raw data from the PACE trial. Given the significance of this paper (of which I was the least important of seven co-authors), I figured it wouldn’t hurt to highlight it again. The heroic Alem Matthees, a patient in Perth, Australia, succeeded…

Every year, Jennie Spotila deconstructs NIH funding on her Occupy M.E. blog. Last November 7, she crunched the numbers for the 2019 fiscal year, and the same day posted another blog with a more urgent message. I am re-posting that blog in full (a bit late), with Jennie’s permission. NIH Funding for ME Needs Life Support…

The Danish ME Association has sent and posted the following open letter to “Danish health politicians,” with a very impressive list of international signatories. It seemed important to give this letter wide circulation. (Note that footnotes 4 and 5 are linked to the names of two of the signatories, as in the original letter.) Open…