Trial By Error

Tag: cochrane

  • 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…

  • Tack and I Write to Psych Medicine; Struthers Writes to Medical Research Council

    A recent study of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for patients with “persistent physical symptoms” (PPS), a category alsocalled “medically unexplained symptoms,” reported null results for its primary outcome. These null results were not mentioned in the conclusion of the abstract, which instead focused on minimal reported benefits for a minority of secondary outcomes. This is…