Tag: MUS
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My Tour of Ireland, Through Wind and Rain; Slides of My Talk
Last month, I took a quick speaking tour around Ireland at the invitation of the Irish ME/CFS Association. I first became acquainted with Tom Kindlon, the association’s assistant chairperson, about ten years ago. I was beginning to look into the background of the PACE trial, which purported to have proven the benefits of graded exercise…
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My Talk at Cambridge Last October on “Epidemiological Sleight-of-Hand: The Troubling Case of ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms’”
I gave a talk at Cambridge University last October called “Epidemiological Sleight-of-Hand: The Troubling Case of ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms.’” More accurately, I gave the same talk on two successive days—October 18th and 19th–because of video malfunctions on the first day. I thought I’d written a post about it, but when I searched recently, I couldn’t…
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Neurology Journal Fixes False Claim in MUS Paper–But Fails to Publish a Correction Notice (Ironically, I Have Added a Correction to the Post!)
UPDATE: August 4, 2021 Dr Villemarette-Pittman, the managing editor of Journal of the Neurological Sciences, has informed me that she has learned from Elsevier that a corrigendum has in fact been written and will be published in the near future. She also informed me that she plays no role in deciding on or setting policy…
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CBT Model of Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Explained; CBT Trial for Q-Fever Fatigue
As I have recently written, four major clinical trials of CBT for so-called MUS have documented the opposite of what the investigators hoped to prove. In fact, the evidence from this research suggests that CBT is not an effective treatment for these conditions. That hasn’t stopped these investigators from claiming otherwise, of course. As my…
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Null Outcomes Presented as Success in Yet Another CBT Trial from Prof Trudie Chalder
Trudie Chalder, a professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) at King’s College London, has recently published yet another high-profile paper: the main results for “efficacy” from a trial of CBT for patients with so-called “persistent physical symptoms” (PPS) in secondary care. As usual with this group of investigators, things haven’t turned out well. But despite…
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More Letters about Professor Anthony David’s Mis-Citations of Key Study on Costs of MUS
I have been in correspondence with the journal Psychological Medicine in my efforts to get it to correct an undisputed factual era related to the cost of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS). After three weeks, the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Professor Robin Murray, finally alerted me on May 4th that the authors “have agreed” to a correction–as…
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Professor David’s Third Mis-Citation of Seminal Study of “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”
*April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 I have recently blogged about the multiple mis-citations…
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A Letter to Psychological Medicine about Error in MUS Paper from Sir Simon and Colleagues
I have previously documented that some of the leading experts in “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS) have regularly misstated a core finding from a seminal study in their field. The study—”The cost of somatisation among the working-age population in England for the year 2008–2009”—was published in 2010 in the journal Mental Health in Family Practice. The…
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Some Thoughts on Long-Covid, ME/CFS and MUS
*October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 Among the troubling phenomena to emerge from the pandemic are the reports from so many Covid-19 patients…
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Professor Chalder’s PRINCE Has Arrived
*October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602 So here’s yet another paper with Professor Trudie Chalder of King’s College London as the senior author.…
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A King’s College London Press Release Hides the Bad News
In teaching courses on covering public health and medical issues, I have often highlighted how university press releases about studies can read like efforts at obfuscating problematic findings rather than providing an accurate account of research. A recent press release from King’s College London, about a high-profile study published by Lancet Psychiatry, is an excellent…
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Coupla More Posts Worth Reading
Ryan Prior is a CNN journalist who told the story of his own ME/CFS diagnosis and illness in the 2015 documentary Forgotten Plague. (I’m interviewed in the film.) On Sunday, he told the story of a friend he met as a result of the film, and the choice she made last year to end her…