Trial By Error

Tag: cochrane

  • My Letter to Cochrane’s Chief Executive Officer

    The other day, I posted yet another blog about Cochrane’s deeply flawed 2019 review of exercise therapy for what it called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and the organization’s decision last December to abandon a planned update. Specifically, I was commenting on a response from the review’s lead author, Lillebeth Larun, to a comment from the…

  • Cochrane CFS/ME Exercise Review “May Not Apply” to Patients Diagnosed with Newer ME/CFS Definitions, Per Lead Author

    It’s hard to keep up with everything going on in this field these days. So I missed the fact that Lillebeth Larun, the lead author behind the deeply flawed Cochrane review of exercise therapies for what the organization then called “CFS/ME,” has concocted yet another unconvincing defense of her work. (Larun is a researcher and…

  • A Letter to Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief

    This morning, I e-mailed the following letter to Dr Karla Soares-Weiser, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, about the decision to abandon a planned update of a review of exercise therapy for ME/CFS. (I cc’d Toby Lasserson, Cochrane’s deputy editor-in-chief.) That decision was made public in an abrupt announcement dumped on the patient community right before the Christmas holidays.…

  • My Article on the Cochrane Mess in The Sick Times

    In November, 2023, journalists Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis launched The Sick Times, a publication whose tagline is “chronicling the Long Covid crisis.” Since then, the publication has diligently tracked the political and medical developments of this post-pandemic pandemic and has become a go-to source for intelligent reporting on the situation. I have previously posted…

  • Professor Edwards’ Letter to BMJ on the Cochrane Mess

    The Cochrane mess, which I wrote about the other day, is threatening to take on a life of its own. Perhaps Cochrane thinks the fuss over the big Christmas “fuck you” it delivered to members of the ME/CFS community will blow over quickly. That could happen, I suppose, but I suspect this issue will continue…

  • Cochrane’s Decision on Exercise Review is Hurting Patients, Says Longtime Insider

    I have written frequently about Cochrane, the organization renowned for its systematic reviews of medical interventions, and its deeply flawed review of exercise therapies for ME/CFS–including its decision last month to abandon its commitment to produce a new version. Now Hilda Bastian, an Australia health consumer advocate and longtime Cochrane insider, has posted a blog…

  • Cochrane Continues Telling ME/CFS Patients to Go F–k Themselves

    Update/Correction: Below, I initially wrote that Cochrane was lying in describing the update plan as a “pilot project.” However, it turns out that the organization did describe its plan to engage community partners as a “pilot project.” Here’s the statement from March, 2020: “Cochrane is conducting a pilot project for engaging stakeholders (such as consumers,…

  • Cochrane Tells ME/CFS Patients to Go F–k Themselves

    Cochrane has just given the finger to the international ME/CFS community. After jerking everyone around and promising for five years to conduct a new review of exercise interventions for the illness, the organization abruptly abandoned that commitment this week. On Monday, Cochrane posted the following message on its website: “In 2019, Cochrane published an amended…

  • Cochrane Ends Silence on ME/CFS Exercise Review Developments

    *This is a crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley for my Trial by Error project. If you appreciate my work and would like to help support it, here’s the link for this November’s campaign. I recently posted about Cochrane’s unsatisfactory responses to a request from the Science for ME forum that the organization withdraw “Exercise therapy for chronic…

  • What’s Going On with Cochrane’s Exercise Review Mess?

    On September 4th, the Science for ME (S4ME) forum sent an open letter to Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, requesting the “immediate withdrawal or retraction” of “Exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome,” a 2019 review. The review over-stated the evidence in favor of exercise therapies and has been widely and appropriately criticized for its seriously flawed…

  • Call for Retraction of Cochrane Review from Science For ME; Overview of Viral Persistence in Long Covid; Senators United on Long Covid

    Sometimes I just like to post about a few things that have caught my interest, for whatever reason. I keep meaning to do this more regularly. Science For ME calls on Cochrane to retract flawed exercise review The Science for ME (S4ME) forum has posted a petition on change.org requesting that Cochrane withdraw its “harmful”…

  • Lightning Process Star Complains About NICE; Struthers Nudges Cochrane to Keep Up

    Another Anti-Science Campaigner Takes Aim at NICE The anti-science zealots do not give up easily. Now Live Landmark, the Norwegian Lightning Process practitioner, has written an opinion piece blasting the new evidence-based guidelines for ME/CFS from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). I assume she is not just upset that the document…