Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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Deja Vu All Over Again with Proposed Lightning Process Study in Norway
It’s déjà vu all over again in Norway with the Lightning Process (LP). Earlier this month, a national research ethics authority, NEM, postponed a decision on a proposed LP trial until at least June. The trial has already been approved by a regional committee. The NEM had been expected to decide at its May meeting…
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An Innumerate Response from Chalder to Hughes-Tuller Comments on Bogus Data Analysis
Last year, King College London’s professor of cognitive behaviour therapy, Trudie Chalder, published another one of her extremely incompetent papers. This one is so statistically challenged as to be truly mind-boggling, even by Professor Chalder’s extremely low standards. A team of purportedly expert researchers has mangled descriptions of their own data so badly that the…
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Speaker at CDC Event Promotes CBT and “Very Gradual” GET
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a long history of missteps when it comes to the illness or cluster of illnesses currently called ME/CFS—as anyone who has read Osler’s Web knows. In the more recent past—2017–the agency dropped its unfortunate endorsement of the discredited GET/CBT treatment approach but made no public comment…
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An Interview With Mt Sinai’s David Putrino About Long Covid, ME/CFS, and Related Issues
David Putrino is a neuroscientist and physical therapist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He runs a research lab and a rehabilitation center that quickly became a magnet for patients grappling with what has come to be known as long Covid–what the US National Institutes of Health calls post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). We…
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Now a Scottish Long Covid Study Fails to Mention the Risk of Post-Exertional Malaise
And here’s another major trial designed by investigators who think that an exercise program might be the optimal strategy for treating the complex grab-bag of conditions known as long Covid. As with other long Covid research, these investigators seem either unaware of or unconcerned about the core ME/CFS symptom known as post-exertional malaise (PEM)–also called…
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Two Reports on the Financial Burden of Long Covid and Its Impact on ME/CFS Prevalence
It is clear that long Covid—however that term is defined–is having enormous impacts on employment, social benefits, disability insurance, and other domains. Even the coronavirus pandemic were to end today, those impacts would continue long into the future. The pandemic is also likely to lead to a rise in the numbers of those diagnosed with…
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An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of “The Invisible Kingdom”
Last Friday, I interviewed poet, journalist and editor Meghan O’Rourke about The Invisible Kingdom, her insightful and affecting memoir of living with chronic illness. As the book recounts, O’Rourke initially began experiencing perplexing physical signs and sensations not long after graduating from Yale in the late 1990s–“daily hives, dizziness, chronic pain, and drenching night sweats.”…
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PACE Team Stages a Comeback Tour
Professors Peter White, Trudie Chalder and Michael Sharpe seem to have embarked on what could be called the PACE Rehabilitation Tour. This is an apparent effort to salvage their reputations and save professional face now that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has officially rescinded its previous recommendations for graded exercise…
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More on the REGAIN Trial for Long Covid Patients
********** I wrote recently about the problematic REGAIN study from the University of Warwick, which is testing an exercise-and-psychological-rehab program as a treatment for long Covid patients. Unfortunately, neither the protocol nor the participant information sheet, to which participants are referred during the consenting process, mentions the core ME/CFS symptom of post-exertional malaise (PEM), which…
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Can Someone Please Slap a Warning Label on this Exercise-and-Rehab Long Covid Study?
I’ve been writing for a while about the rush to treat long Covid patients with the outdated and debunked approach long applied to ME/CFS. A major effort to demonstrate that an exercise program can lead to “recovery” from long Covid, sponsored by the University of Warwick and funded with £1.200,000 from the UK’s National Institute…
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British GP Journal Retracts “Opinion” About Lightning Process Written By LP Practitioner
This week, a journal under the umbrella of the British Journal of General Practice published–and a day later unpublished–a laudatory piece about the Lightning Process from a Lightning Process practitioner. The author, Anna Chellamuthu, is also a GP at Royal Cornwall Hospital. She wrote that the controversial program combining neurolinguistic program, osteopathy and life-coaching cured…