Category: ME/CFS
-
Does “Long Covid” Need Rebranding As “Ongoing Covid-19 Recovery”?
Now here’s a paper called “The Effects of Messaging on Expectations and Understanding of Long COVID: An Online Randomised Trial,” from researchers at the UK’s Health Security Agency. Two of the nine authors, including the senior author who conceived the study, are also affiliated with a National Institute for Health Research unit that partners with…
-
Q-and-A with Natalie Boulton, Director of “Dialogues for a Neglected Illness”
More than ten years ago, Natalie Boulton and her son, Josh, made a film called “Voices from the Shadows,” about the plight of ME patients. Natalie, from Bristol, England, was intimately familiar with the issue because of the long-time illness of her daughter, Anna. The film, a harrowing depiction of the ravages of ME, helped…
-
French Dogs on the Trail; Impact of Long Covid on the US Job Market
Can Dogs Smell Compounds Associated with Host Response in Long Covid? It can be unwise to pay attention to research published on a pre-print server before it has been through a peer-review process. Although passing through peer-review is itself no guarantee of quality, the process represents at least one layer of scrutiny. Nonetheless, some pre-prints…
-
Dutch CBT Trial Targets “Dysfunctional Beliefs About Fatigue” in Long Covid Patients
Since the emergence of the phenomenon now called long Covid (or Long COVID, depending on news organization), skeptics have been out in full force. Even as huge numbers of people experience a range of sequelae after a bout of Covid-19, some experts maintain that common non-specific symptoms, like cognitive impairment and relapses of profound exhaustion,…
-
Awaiting Response on Chalder Paper; Australian GPs Still Promoting GET and Citing PACE
Last month, the journal Occupational Medicine published an innumerate article from Professor Trudie Chalder and several colleagues at King’s College London, called “Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status: a retrospective longitudinal study.” Professor Brian Hughes, a psychologist at National University of Ireland, Galway, and I alerted the journal of some disqualifying issues with the paper,…
-
An Exchange of Letters Concerning Professor Chalder’s Latest Disaster of a Paper
Last week, Brian Hughes and I sent a letter to Occupational Medicine, which recently published yet another of Professor Trudie Chalder’s awful papers. Among other problems, Professor Chalder and her four co-authors completely misstated their own findings in the text of the paper. We called for retraction of the paper. In the past, I have…
-
Mayo Clinic Treatment Plan Cites “Deconditioning,” “Perfectionism,” and CBT
The renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has a poor record when it comes to ME/CFS. It has a history of pushing the graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) approach outlined in the now-discredited PACE trial. These interventions were based on the notion that the symptoms were perpetuated from a mish-mosh of…
-
A Letter to Occupational Medicine From Brian Hughes & Me About Prof Chalder’s Latest Disaster
Members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades produce a gusher of dreck, and I don’t bother commenting on most of their work. Life’s too short. So it can be easy to lose sight of how flawed and truly awful each individual paper can be. But even among this flood of scientifically deficient research, a recent paper…
-
More on that Disastrous Employment Paper from Professor Chalder and Colleagues
A few days ago, I wrote a post about yet another atrocious paper from Professor Trudie Chalder—this one called “Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status: a retrospective longitudinal study.” Professor Chalder and her colleagues seem constitutionally incapable of writing anything that isn’t marred by massive flaws. In this case, as I noted the other day,…
-
Professor Chalder Messes Up Again in New Paper on CFS and Employment Outcomes
Same-Day Update: In re-reading the new paper, I noticed that the discussion section also features errors involving the percentages. It includes this sentence: “About 9% of individuals who were not working at baseline had returned to work at follow-up.” And this one: “Further, 6% of those working at baseline were no longer working at follow-up.”…
-
Lightning Process Star Complains About NICE; Struthers Nudges Cochrane to Keep Up
Another Anti-Science Campaigner Takes Aim at NICE The anti-science zealots do not give up easily. Now Live Landmark, the Norwegian Lightning Process practitioner, has written an opinion piece blasting the new evidence-based guidelines for ME/CFS from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). I assume she is not just upset that the document…
-
New Paper From PACE Authors Repeats Bogus Arguments and Defenses
The October 29th publication of the new guideline for ME/CFS from Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) represented an enormous and humiliating repudiation of the PACE trial and the many related studies of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) as treatments for the illness. That means it also represented…