Trial By Error, by David Tuller
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Letter to BMJ Seeking Correction in Study of Long Covid Physical-and-Mental Rehabilitation Program
Last month, The BMJ published a study of a rehab intervention for Long Covid in which the authors made claims that were not borne out by the data. The study was called “Clinical effectiveness of an online supervised group physical and mental health rehabilitation programme for adults with post-covid-19 condition (REGAIN study): multicentre randomised controlled…
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Will MAGENTA’s Null Results Finally End Professor Crawley’s Long ‘Reign of Error’?
For years, Professor Esther Crawley, the University of Bristol’s methodologically and ethically challenged ME/CFS investigator, has hoovered up millions of pounds from public and private funders to support her misbegotten research. She achieved this success as a grant magnet despite abundant and easily available evidence that she was violating core principles of scientific research. Now,…
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An Interview with Neuroscientist Michael VanElzakker about the Just-Published and Long-Awaited NIH Study
So, okay…The big enchilada from the US National Institutes of Health’s seven-year, $8-million, under-recruited and over-hyped study—”Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome”–was published last week in Nature Communications. It would be fair to describe the ensuing public debate over this massive text-and-data dump as spirited. (NIH press release here; articles in The New…
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New Long Covid Exercise-and-Therapy Study Claims Success Despite Clinically Insignificant Findings
A new study of an online group physical and psychological rehabilitation program for Long Covid confirms once again that people given an intervention purporting to help them are more likely to tell investigators that they feel better than those given nothing of the kind. People, this is not a surprising result! It certainly wasn’t necessary…
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Sarah Boothby Discusses Second Pre-Inquest Hearing into Death of Daughter Maeve from ME Complications
Maeve Boothby O’Neill died of complications from ME in Exeter, England, in October, 2021, after three admissions to the local hospital. (I wrote about Maeve’s life and death last year for Codastory.com.) Since then, the family has been waiting for an inquest to be held into the circumstances of her death and the actions of…
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Leading FND Site Confirms Criticisms on Prevalence Outlined in Our Letter to Neurology Journal
In two recent posts, here and here, I wrote about our letter on inflated prevalence claims for functional neurological disorder (FND) and about the response from the authors of the study we criticized. The 2021 article in NeuroImage: Clinical, “Neuroimaging in functional neurological disorder: state of the field and research agenda,” asserted that FND was the…
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Unconvincing Response to Letter on FND Prevalence Inflation
As I wrote in a post the other day, the journal NeuroImage: Clinical has just published a letter from a group I organized about the misrepresentation of findings regarding the prevalence of functional neurological disorder (FND). They have also published a response from the authors of the article we criticized. The findings in question were…
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Finally, Our Letter on Inflated Claims of FND Prevalence Is Published
For more than a year, I have been criticizing experts in the field of functional neurological disorder for misrepresenting the findings of a seminal study, in effect tripling the reported prevalence rate of the condition. These untrue claims about the Scottish Neurological Symptoms Study (SNSS)—specifically, that the prevalence of FND among outpatient neurology clinics was…
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Yet Another ME-Related Death
It has been a season of loss. Two weeks ago, I posted an obituary for the much-loved ME patient advocate Beth Mazur, who co-founded #MEAction and suffered with the disease for years. Last October, I posted tributes to Celine Corsius from her parents and brother; Celine died by euthanasia under Dutch law, also after many…
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Debate Over Recent Citation of Arguably Fraudulent PACE Trial
Having a discussion about the PACE trial with someone who still maintains it was a well-conducted study is like debating the 2020 election with a Trumper who insists that Biden lost. These two distinct groups exhibit the same remarkable inability or willful refusal to understand and accept reality, whether it involves basic scientific constructs or…
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Interview with Dr Rob Wüst about New Study of Muscle Abnormalities in Long Covid
In early January, Nature Communications published a Dutch study called “Muscle abnormalities worsen after post-exertional malaise in long COVID.” The study caused a buzz among patients, clinicians, and other researchers and generated extensive news coverage. Called. (I wrote a blog post about it here.) The investigators identified significant biological differences after an exercise challenge between…