Trial By Error

Category: Syndicated

  • More on the BMJ Opinion Piece from the Psychobabblers

    When it comes to ME and ME/CFS, The BMJ—formerly called The British Medical Journal but now, like the food franchise once known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, officially reduced to a mere acronym—is a long-time champion of the “biopsychosocial” ideological brigades. (I use the “scare quotes” because the term is a misnomer, given that these experts…

  • BMJ Publishes New Propaganda Piece on Severe ME/CFS

    Last week, The BMJ published a commissioned propaganda piece—er, “opinion”—written by confirmed members of the cognitive behavior therapy/graded exercise therapy/Lightning Process ideological brigades. The title: “Patients with severe ME/CFS need hope and expert multidisciplinary care.” It repeats all the usual blah blah, along with the unwarranted assertions and evidence-free arguments about patients’ “beliefs” as a…

  • Pushback on “Brief Outpatient Rehab” Trial for Long Covid from Norwegian Ideological Brigades

    I often find myself responding to crap studies–such as a Norwegian study called “Brief Outpatient Rehabilitation Program for Post–COVID-19 Condition: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” from Nerli et al., published last December by JAMA Network Open. The senior author was Professor Vegard Wyller, the dean of the Norwegian wing of the CBT/GET/Lightning Process ideological brigades. The…

  • A Letter Seeking a Correction in FMD Physiotherapy Paper

    I have recently written about a trial of an intervention for functional motor disorder (FMD) that had null results for its primary outcome—physical function as rated by the SF-36. The study–“Specialist Physiotherapy for functional motor disorder in England and Scotland (Physio4FMD): a pragmatic, multicentre, phase 3 randomised controlled trial,” published by The Lancet Neurology—had some…

  • When Primary Outcomes Yield Null Results in Clinical Trials, FND Experts Prefer Their Secondary Outcomes

    In 2020, the CODES study of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, also known as dissociative seizures, reported null findings for its primary outcome—the number of seizures per month one year after the start of therapy. This was a disappointing result for an ambitious effort to seek an effective treatment for a disabling…

  • Australian GPs Keep Promoting Exercise Treatments for ME/CFS

    When it comes to treatments for ME/CFS, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has long endorsed the graded exercise therapy (GET)/cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approach. Last April, the organization published an “updated” article in its Handbook of Non-Drug Interventions (HANDI) advocating “incremental physical activity” for what it called CFS/ME. “Incremental physical activity” was…

  • Andrew Ewing & David Joffe on Just-Published “Global Expert Consensus” on Long Covid

    Last week, the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials published the results of a major effort to collate international expertise on Long Covid. The article–“Long COVID clinical evaluation, research and impact on society: a global expert consensus”—was produced under the auspices of the Long COVID Advisory Group of the World Health Network, a global…

  • #MEAction’s Jaime Seltzer on Where We’ve Been, What We’ve Learned, and Where Things Are Now

    It’s been five years, more or less, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic–and the subsequent wave of Long Covid. I spoke earlier today with Jaime Seltzer, #MEAction’s scientific director, about how early links were forged between advocates for people with ME and those experiencing what became known as Long Covid, what we’ve learned since,…

  • In a Compelling Documentary, Five Doctors Discuss Being Sick

    I first connected with Anil van der Zee, a severe ME patient in Amsterdam, when he reached out almost ten years ago to invite me to talk at an event he was organizing in Amsterdam. In his former life, Anil was a ballet dancer. Now, from his bed, he creates compelling and often visually stunning…

  • Null Results in Physiotherapy Trial for Functional Motor Disorder

    It must be tough for investigators when a major study seeking to assess the effectiveness of an intervention for a challenging condition yields null results. That’s what happened in 2019 with a trial of rituximab for ME/CFS, published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Findings from earlier research had suggested that rituximab, a drug used to…

  • New Zealand GP Group Disavows Lightning Process Endorsement; BBC’s Con or Cure Takes Skeptical Look at LP

    “A small step in New Zealand” Sometimes there is modest good news. In this case, the good news is all due to the diligent efforts of Nina Steinkopf, who writes the always useful blog MElife (MElivet). Steinkopf, who was diagnosed with ME in 2010, mostly covers goings-on in Norway and across Scandinavia. That means she…

  • My Visits with Alem Matthees, 2025

    In 2018, I spent six weeks in Australia, visiting multiple cities on a kind of “chronic fatigue” tour around the country. (In Australia, doctors and patients more often than not referred to the cluster of overlapping illnesses now generally being called ME/CFS as simply “chronic fatigue.”) Near the end, I spent five days in Perth.…