Tag: MUS
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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”
I have recently blogged about the multiple mis-citations of a seminal study involving so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS). The 2010 study, Bermingham et al, found that the amount spent by the National Health Service on working-age people who were assessed as “somatising” accounted for around 10% of what was spent on that population. Since the…
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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
Among the troubling phenomena to emerge from the pandemic are the reports from so many Covid-19 patients of a range of persistent non-specific symptoms—fatigue, dizziness, cognitive impairments, and on and on. Some people who got sick in the early days, back in March and April, have now been experiencing symptoms for six months or more—the…
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Professor Chalder’s PRINCE Has Arrived
So here’s yet another paper with Professor Trudie Chalder of King’s College London as the senior author. That usually means there’s a lot to dig into! In this case, the journal is BMC Family Practice and the paper is titled “Integrated GP care for patients with persistent physical symptoms: feasibility cluster randomized trial.” Professor Chalder’s…
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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…
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A Couple of Blog Posts Worth Reading
I’ve been writing about so-called “medically unexplained symptoms,” or MUS, for the last couple of years. Much of that has come in the form of critiques of specific studies making excessive claims about the healing powers of cognitive behavior therapy. Recently, a blogger named Goodelf has posted a couple of revealing posts about the overall…