Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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My Letter to Professor Chew-Graham About METRIC
Earlier this evening, I sent the following e-mail to Carolyn Crew-Graham, a professor of general practice research at Keele University. Professor Chew-Graham is the lead author of METRIC, the atrocious online training course hailed last week by Steve Brine MP as addressing “misconceptions” about the illness variously called ME, CFS, CFS/ME and ME/CFS. Professor Chew-Graham…
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Steve Brine’s Troubling Claim in Parliamentary Debate on ME
Update on January 29: I love how patients keep me on my toes. A savvy reader pointed out to me today that even members of the GET/CBT ideological brigades have dropped the notion that attributing symptoms to a physical cause itself leads to a poor prognosis. That was the prevailing outlook some years ago, but…
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Action For ME’s Employment Advice
Action For ME is the largest charity for this disease in the UK. It is also the charity responsible for enabling the PACE trial through its unfortunate decision to work with the investigators to develop “adaptive pacing therapy.” This was a terrible idea from the start, for multiple reasons. First, the PACE investigators had already…
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S4ME Summary for Week of January 14th
As I mentioned in my six-month review, I always feel that there are lots of issues I don’t get to. To broaden the blog’s range a bit and, hopefully, increase its usefulness to readers, I figured it was a good idea to post the weekly round-up of news posted on the invaluable Science For ME…
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My Six-Month Review
So it’s time again to review my work and figure out what I’ve been doing. My crowdfunding from last April has been covering my half-time position at Berkeley since July 1, so December 31 marks the end of the first six months. The Berkeley fiscal year ends June 30th, so I will need to decide…
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Carol Monaghan Scores Another Parliamentary Debate
Carol Monaghan, a member of Parliament from the Glasgow area, has done it again. This week she is spearheading a three-hour debate in the House of Commons about the awful situation confronting ME patients in the UK. (The organizers of this debate are using ME, not CFS or ME/CFS or CFS/ME. As readers know, the…
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More Thoughts on the Interferon Study
I was surprised recently when the UK press made a big splash about what was, in the end, a modest study from a team led by Carmine Pariante, a professor of psychiatry at Kings College London. I was less surprised when I realized that the Science Media Centre was involved in disseminating the news. The…
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My Letter to LP Study’s Senior Author
Alan Montgomery is a professor of medical statistics and clinical trials at the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine. He is also the senior author of the Lightning Process study published in 2017 in Archives of Disease in Childhood, a BMJ journal. Professor Montgomery formerly worked at University of Bristol, along with Professor Esther Crawley…
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My Norwegian Interview
In addition to giving a couple of talks in Norway, I also answered some questions from Trude Schei, assistant Secretary General of the Norwegian ME Association. I doubt I said anything I haven’t stated many times before. However, members of the GET/CBT ideological brigades–in Norway and elsewhere–continue to maintain against all the evidence that their…
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“Talk is Cheap,” Patients Tell NIH
Earlier this month, NIH director Francis Collins and other agency officials held a meeting with five representatives from #MEAction. According to the group’s post about the meeting, the goal was “to discuss accelerating research in order to more rapidly provide diagnostics and treatments to people with ME.” Specifically, #MEAction urged the agency to develop “bold…
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Australian Draft Report Seeks Comments
In an eagerly awaited draft report, an Australian advisory committee on ME/CFS has called for the development of up-to-date domestic clinical guidelines and an increase in biomedical research into the pathophysiology of the illness. The draft report, which could have a major impact on health policy going forward, also highlights the potentially dangerous impacts of…
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The New Interferon “CFS” Study
I haven’t had time to cover the new and wildly over-hyped study about prolonged fatigue–and purportedly about “chronic fatigue syndrome”–that was published this week in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. Thanks no doubt to the involvement of the Science Media Centre, this mildly interesting piece of research has received widespread media attention. Since the study team included…