Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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QMUL and FOI; Nature and Cochrane; the Pineapple Fund
Queen Mary University of London seems to have devised a fail-safe method of avoiding having to comply with more PACE-related freedom-of-information requests—just declare no one is around who can deal with it. Earlier this month, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office issued a decision in an appeal of QMUL’s rejection of a FOI request. The ICO…
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Letter to British Journal of Sports Medicine from CPET Experts
Last October, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a short paper that was essentially a summary of Cochrane’s systematic review of graded exercise for chronic fatigue syndrome (as Cochrane calls the illness). This systematic review is problematic for a number of reasons—not least of which is that it includes the debunked PACE trial and…
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A Letter to Archives of Disease in Childhood
Earlier today, Professor Racaniello e-mailed the following letter to Nick Brown, the editor-in-chief of Archives of Disease in Childhood, one of the journals from the BMJ Group. Archives recently published a study of the Lightning Process in kids with ME/CFS. ********** Dear Dr. Brown: In September, Archives of Disease in Childhood published a study called…
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Professor Crawley’s Bogus BuzzFeed Claims
Tom Chivers’ terrific article on the Lightning Process and Professor Esther Crawley’s SMILE trial in the Archives of Disease in Childhood has received a lot of attention and comment. I wanted to respond to the short sections in which Professor Crawley seeks to justify her methodological choices. Here are the relevant passages: In the highest-quality…
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My Six-Month Review
This month is the start of the second half of my one-year crowdfunding commitment to keep reporting on ME/CFS, so I figured I should review what I’ve done so far, what I still hope to do, and what changes have taken place during the last six months. So, here goes. From July 1st through December…
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COPE to BMJ Open: More Details, Please!
Yesterday I reviewed an account of a publishing dilemma that had been submitted to the forum of the Committee on Publication Ethics. The COPE forum offers advice on thorny situations submitted anonymously by members. In this case, the submission appeared to be from BMJ Open and it appeared to be discussing Professor Esther Crawley’s school…
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The School Absence Study, Revisited
This post is about a serious issue–ethical approval for research studies involving children. It is also about how powerful institutions, like leading medical journals, respond to concerns. But the story is really too long and complicated. I recommend it only for those following things pretty closely or who for whatever reason like this kind of…
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A Sneak Preview of Next Week’s Post
I wanted to post something this week, but not a whole long thing. So I thought I’d just post the top of what I’ll post in full next week. This week ends the first half–six months!–of my crowdfunded project. Sometime soon I’ll post something or other looking backward and forward a bit. But not today.…
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Bristol’s Complaint to Berkeley
As it turns out, the University of Bristol did complain about me to Berkeley. I found out recently that there has indeed been “private and confidential communication” at a “senior level,” as Sue Paterson, Bristol’s director of legal services, suggested in her thuggish letter to me last month. I haven’t seen this communication so I’m…
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My Questions for the Science Media Centre
On September 20, 2017, a BMJ Publishing Group journal, Archives of Disease in Childhood published the SMILE trial. This trial investigated an intervention called the Lightning Process as a treatment for kids with CFS/ME (as the study called the disease). The lead investigator was Professor Esther Crawley, the University of Bristol pediatrician and a well-known…
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The SMILE Trial’s Undisclosed Outcome-Swapping
So let’s talk about Professor Esther Crawley’s SMILE trial, published in September by the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, one of the BMJ Publishing Group’s titles. The study reported that a commercial intervention called the Lightning Process was an effective treatment for children with CFS/ME when offered along with what was called “specialist medical…
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My One-Sided Correspondence with Professor Crawley
Well, last week was certainly exciting! As I wrote on Wednesday, I was planning to post about Professor Esther Crawley’s SMILE trial. However, that plan changed when Sue Paterson, the University of Bristol’s director of legal services, e-mailed me what I guess was supposed to be a scary letter. The letter pointedly cited the “close…