Category: ME/CFS

Professor Michael Sharpe blocked me on Twitter many weeks ago but apparently can’t restrain himself from tweeting at me again. Maybe I’ve gotten under his skin. Yesterday he tweeted what must have felt to him like a slam-dunk question: He wanted to know how many clinical trials I have conducted. The answer is none. But…

Update (7/6/18): I sent a follow-up e-mail to Dr Godlee yesterday to correct an inaccuracy in what I wrote about the 2011 report on PACE in The BMJ. I have included that follow-up e-mail at the end of this post. Earlier today, I e-mailed the following letter to Fiona Godlee, the editor-in-chief at The BMJ…

Update: Lucibee has done what I didn’t want to bother to do. Here’s her annotated version of Professor Sharpe’s statement: https://lucibee.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/sharpes-briefing-on-the-so-called-pace-trial-for-the-21-june-2018-westminster-hall-debate/ Before last month’s hearing in Westminster Hall, Professor Michael Sharpe sent the following briefing notes to Carol Monaghan MP. To anyone who knows the details of the PACE scandal, it is immediately evident that…

I recently wrote to Oxford University neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, who had provided a statement to the Science Media Centre about the Lightning Process study. Although she had expressed concerns about the pseudo-scientific nature of the intervention, she found it to be generally well conducted and noted that the findings appeared to be solid. In my…

By Steven Lubet Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, where he specializes in professional responsibility and ethics. Let’s assume that everyone on the PACE team, and all of their colleagues in the biopsychosocial school, always acted in complete good faith. Let’s agree that they all want nothing…

This morning, Professor Racaniello sent the following e-mail to Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. The subject heading: “Another open letter about the PACE trial.” He cc’d the three lead PACE investigators and the public relations office at Queen Mary University of London. Virology Blog’s previous open letter to The Lancet about the PACE trial…

Update: 6/26/18 When I wrote last week in the post below about Mike Godwin’s intervention into the PACE debate, I mentioned that “a PACE critic” triggered the events by tweeting a reference to “the banality of evil”–the famous Hannah Arendt phrase that emerged out of her coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. For…

This morning I sent the following e-mail to key NICE executives involved in the effort to overhaul the clinical guidance for ME/CFS. I cc’d several stakeholders in the process as well. Dear Sir Andrew and Professor Baker (and others)— In an e-mail to Sir Andrew last year, I posed some questions concerning the involvement of…

Ten years ago, the National Health Service began rolling out across England a program called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, or IAPT. This program arose out of the notion that many people were suffering from untreated depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders. In parallel with that, research suggested that treating these ailments would not only…

This morning I sent three more e-mails alerting interested parties to my concerns about two BMJ studies of children with ME/CFS. When it comes to research, kids are already a vulnerable population, and those with a stigmatizing illness even more so. That’s why it is both surprising and troubling that BMJ appears to have little…

I have sent the following e-mail to Edward Sykes, the head of mental health and neuroscience at the Science Media Centre. The e-mail concerns the Lightning Process study published last year in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The SMC promoted the findings, which received widespread media coverage. I have cc’d Fiona Godlee, the editor in…

I am not sure what is going on at BMJ and why editors there seem incapable of acknowledging their flawed decision-making when it comes to two papers that should never have been accepted for publication. One violated BMJ’s policy that all trials must be properly prospectively registered, with no participants recruited beforehand. The other violated…