Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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Just the Latest Gibberish from Professor Chalder
I’ve said it before and will undoubtedly say it again. Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s mathematically and factually challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), is a one-trick pony. She writes what is essentially the same bad paper based on the same unfounded assumptions over and over again. Her apparent professional success represents, at least…
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Professor Chris Ponting Discusses on DecodeME’s First Results
Professor Chris Ponting is a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the principal investigator for DecodeME, a genome wide association study. The DecodeME team recently published findings from more than 17,000 questionnaires it had collected from patients. In our conversation, Professor Ponting discussed these results, why it is important to have patients…
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DecodeME Team Describes Study Sample; The Atlantic’s Ed Yong Covers PEM; STAT Busts NIH’s Stumbling Long Covid Efforts
DecodeME paper finds ME/CFS severity linked to being female, being older and being sick longer DecodeME is a high-profile genome-wide association study (GWAS) that is seeking to identify DNA differences between people with ME/CFS and those without it. To date, more than 17,000 people in the UK who report having been diagnosed with ME/CFS have…
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Rapid Response to Anti-NICE Whine de Coeur; UK Government Seeks Input to Interim Delivery Plan for ME/CFS
The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry (JNNP) has finally published a cogent rapid response to its recent whine de coeur from the PACE authors and their cronies. In the commentary, the co-authors criticized eight purported “anomalies” they believe occurred during the process of developing the 2021 ME/CFS guideline from Britain’s National Institute for Health…
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More on the Perplexing Dutch Claim that Null Results for Objective Measures of Physical Activity Are Irrelevant to Fatigue
I recently wrote about a Dutch study published a few months ago in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases–“Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nick-named ReCOVer, found that unblinded trials relying on subjective outcomes will produce modestly positive reports in the group receiving…
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That Whine De Coeur about NICE’s Rejection of GET/CBT Regimen, and ME Action UK’s Disappearing Rebuttal
On July 10th, the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry (JNNP) published what can only be called a whine de coeur from a bunch of academics and investigators on the wrong side of a dispute with Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Their article was called “Anomalies in the review process and…
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Psych Medicine’s Rejects Request for Correction of Prevalence Rates Cited in FND Paper–Updated
UPDATE: Not long after I sent the letter repeating our request for a correction, I received a response directly from Professor Murray, the editor-in-chief of Psychological Medicine who had commented on the length of our initial request for a correction. Here it is: From: Robin Murray Date: Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 9:02 AM Subject: Re: request…
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Dutch Team Offers “Dog-Ate-My-Data” Excuses for Not Reporting Null Objective Findings
Two months ago, Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID), a high-impact journal, published a study called “Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nicknamed ReCOVer amd conducted in the Netherlands, purported to provide the “first evidence for the positive effect of CBT in patients with…
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Update on Efforts to Correct False Statements about FND Prevalence
I have continued writing my letter-writing effort to alert journals about papers on functional neurological disorder (FND) that have included false statements regarding the prevalence of the condition reported by a seminal study in the field the reported prevalence of the condition. (I was going to refer to this as a “letter-writing campaign” until I…
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My Twitter Thread about Slate’s Piece on Long Covid and Mental Illness
Slate recently ran a piece by a young journalist and Stanford neuroscience graduate student, Grace Huckins, about purported links between long Covid and mental illness. I found it problematic. For one thing, in the same sentence it linked to both a story of mine in Codastory.com and one from The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong, and asserted…
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A Letter to Psychological Medicine about Inflated FND Rate Claims
The journal NeuroImage: Clinical, an Elsevier title, recently agreed to correct the false statement that a 2010 study found functional neurological disorder to be the second-most-common diagnosis at outpatient neurology clinics. To the journal’s credit, it responded positively within days of receiving a letter about the matter from a group of us, although the correction…
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A Letter Requesting Corrections of Inflated Prevalence Rates in Nine More FND Papers
Several colleagues and I recently wrote to the journal NeuroImage: Clinical to request a correction in a 2021 article about functional neurological disorder (FND). The article included the false claim that a seminal 2010 study found that FND was the second-most-common diagnosis at outpatient neurology clinics. In fact, FND—called conversion disorder at the time—was the…