Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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The Surprising New BMJ Best Practice Guide
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…
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Current NICE Guidance Stands, For Now
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,…
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Another Letter to NICE’s Sir Andrew Dillon
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…
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NIH Grants $2.1 Million to UK Biobank!
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…
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NICE Rejects Current Guidance, Plans “Full Update”
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…
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MEGA’s Latest Failure
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…
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The NICE “Topic Expert” Reports
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…
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Seeking More Details on Crawley School Absence Study
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”…
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No Ethical Review of Crawley School Absence Study
This is a complicated post. Here are the key points. The rest is details: *Professor Esther Crawley and co-authors claimed a 2011 study in BMJ Open was exempt from ethical review because it involved the routine collection of data for “service evaluation.” Yet the 2011 study was not an evaluation of routine clinical service provision–it…
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My E-Mail Exchange With NICE Chief Executive
On Friday, I had an e-mail exchange with Sir Andrew Dillon, chief executive of the NICE Guidance Executive. The other seven Guidance Executive members are various directors within the NICE hierarchy, including the communications director. This group will make the final decision about whether to accept the provisional decision of a NICE surveillance review team…
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Retired PACE Investigator Peter White and Swiss Re
On November 17, 2015, a few weeks after publication of my 15,000-word investigation of the PACE trial, I posted a blog about a talk Peter White gave to Swiss Re employees on the findings from his bogus study. Professor White, of course, was the lead PACE investigator and also served–and apparently still serves–as “chief medical…
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The Science Media Centre’s Desperate Efforts to Defend PACE
This week, the Journal of Health Psychology published a special issue containing a raft of commentaries on the PACE trial. Most of them slammed the study for its many, many unacceptable flaws. Not surprisingly, Sir Simon Wessely’s lackeys at the Science Media Centre immediately posted three comments from “experts” lauding the trial and criticizing the…