Trial By Error

Tag: Crawley

  • Professor Crawley Was Asked to Correct Ethics Statements in 11 Papers; 7 Are Still Uncorrected

    A few years ago, a valued source alerted me to a strange quirk in the work of pediatrician Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged star researcher and grant magnet. Not all tips are reliable, but this one definitely was. As it turned out, Professor Crawley had–based on a single 2007 letter from a…

  • My Letter to BMJ Paediatrics Open About Missing Peer Reviews for Crawley Paper

    I recently noted that BMJ Paediatrics Open did not publish the peer review history of a 2021 study from a team led by Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet. The study (Clery et al) was titled “Qualitative study of the acceptability and feasibility of acceptance and commitment therapy…

  • If Professor Crawley’s ACT Study Was Peer Reviewed, Where Are the Peer Reviews?

    Yesterday, I wrote a blog about a just-published but already out-dated conference abstract from a team led by Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet. After I tweeted about it, I heard from Naomi Harvey, a zoologist, who said she’d written to BJPsychOpen about the abstract’s flaws. Hopefully, she—and…

  • Professor Crawley Promotes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for CBT Failures

    What is going on with Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and grant magnet? And why is she still disseminating misguided views about treatments for vulnerable children? Haven’t kids suffered enough from the discredited claims of the GET/CBT ideological brigades? Just last week, the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust…

  • Some Lightning Process Updates

    A Final Round in Norway Lightning Process supporters got some bad news recently when a Norwegian national research ethics panel rejected a proposed study because it was poorly designed and fraught with conflicts of interest, as I wrote about here. But that wasn’t the end of the drama. Although the ethics panel’s decision was meant…

  • Professors Chalder and Crawley Join Forces to Push CBT for Kids

    On November 10th, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence published a draft of new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS. The draft represented a blunt rejection of the argument that the combination of “unhelpful cognitions” and deconditioning drives the illness. Under this once-hegemonic framework, indicated therapies include cognitive behavior therapy to overcome the unhelpful cognitions…

  • Some Stuff about Long-Covid, BMJ and ME

    It is clear that there will be much grappling going forward over the similarities and differences between long-Covid and ME (or CFS, or ME/CFS, or whatever this illness or cluster of illnesses is being called). The two entities overlap in some ways, but no one should conflate them. We are past the pandemic’s half-year mark.…

  • The Lightning Process Strikes Again

    The Lightning Process was founded more than two decades ago by Phil Parker, a British Tarot reader and specialist in auras and spiritual guides. The LP, as it is often called, could be described as “a neuro-physiological training programme based on self-coaching, concepts from Positive Psychology, Osteopathy and Neuro Linguistic Programming,” as Parker and colleagues…

  • UK Funds Genetics Project; My Letter to CODES Investigators

    UK Funding for Major Genetics ME Study Two of the UK’s largest public funding agencies announced this week that they would provide £3.2 million (around $4 million at current rates) for a study that will analyze genetic material from as many as 20,000 people to search for underlying causes of myalgic encephalomyelitis. The Medical Research…