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Update: About 20 minutes after posting this blog, I received the following communication from Ms. Paterson: Dear Dr Tuller Thank you for your email of 22 November. If by a ‘cease and desist’ letter you mean a letter threatening legal action if the recipient does not stop a specified activity or behaviour, then I can…

Earlier today, I e-mailed the following letter to Sue Paterson, University of Bristol’s Director of Legal Services, to clarify whether or not I had been sent a cease and desist letter (to cease and desist what, exactly?). Professor Esther Crawley made this claim at her public talk last Friday. I have never received any such…

At noon last Friday, at the University of Exeter’s Mood Disorders Centre, Professor Esther Crawley gave a talk called “What is new in paediatric CFS/ME research.” When I saw a notice about the event the day before, I felt it might be my one chance to ask her directly about her concerns regarding my work…

Something’s weird over at BMJ Best Practice, a resource for clinical decision-making and an arm of the BMJ Publishing Group. Two days ago, Steven Lubet and I posted a blog praising the new guide written by Dr. James Baraniuk and apparently reviewed by Peter White, along with two other experts. First, I want to acknowledge…

By Steven Lubet, JD, and David Tuller, DrPH Update: Nov 13th We wrote this post based on a version of the guide that appeared recently and had been updated on July 31, 2017. That version lists Peter White as among three peer-reviewers. As commenters pointed out soon after the post went up, however, Peter White’s…

Last week I sent an e-mail with some questions to Sir Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). In particular, the questions involved the status of the ten-year-old guidance for CFS/ME, CG53, and of references to the illness elsewhere within the NICE system. A few days ago,…

First, for those who might have missed it, here’s a conversation from This Week in Virology (TWiV), posted a few days ago. Dr. Racaniello and I discuss the CDC, NICE, Esther Crawley’s ethically challenged behavior, the CMRC, and other stuff. Second, earlier today, I sent the following e-mail to Sir Andrew Dillon, the NICE chief…

The National Institutes of Health is making a $2.1 million grant to the UK ME/CFS Biobank–a huge endorsement of this important project run by CureME and housed at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Here’s what the ME Association wrote on its website: “The funding represents the biggest ever single investment in biomedical…

Let’s give credit where it’s due. Apparently someone with decision-making authority at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has a grasp on reality and is willing to challenge the claims of the biopsychosocial ideological brigades. That’s the only logical explanation for last Wednesday’s welcome but unexpected announcement that the agency would pursue…

In his welcome talk at last week’s annual conference of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative (CMRC), the chair, Professor Stephen Holgate, praised his colleague and second-in-command, Professor Esther Crawley, for her “stunning” and “amazing” work on the group’s main research initiative. There was just one problem: That initiative, the ME/CFS Epidemiology and Genomics Alliance (MEGA), had…

My first recent freedom of information request to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was for information about the experts consulted in the current process of reviewing CG53, the 2007 guidance for the illness the agency calls chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis. In its response, the agency explained that seven topic experts had…

This morning I sent the following freedom of information request to Bristol University. My friend and colleague Steven Lubet, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, joined me in making this request. Professor Lubet is an expert on legal ethics, among many other fields, and in July he guest-blogged here about the purported “ethics”…