Trial By Error

Tag: Netherlands

  • Celine Corsius–In Memorium

    Céline Corsius, a 32-year-old from the Netherlands, died through euthanasia on September 18th after suffering with ME for 22 years. For the last seven years, she was confined to her bed, lying in the dark. Even so, her health situation continued to deteriorate. She was cared for by her parents, Iselle and Lou Corsius. Below…

  • My Twitter Thread about Slate’s Piece on Long Covid and Mental Illness

    Slate recently ran a piece by a young journalist and Stanford neuroscience graduate student, Grace Huckins, about purported links between long Covid and mental illness. I found it problematic. For one thing, in the same sentence it linked to both a story of mine in Codastory.com and one from The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong, and asserted…

  • Claim that CBT Is Safe Is “Misleading,” Says Dutch Ad Group

    In a recent decision, the Advertising Code Foundation in the Netherlands has criticized as “misleading” a statement on the website of the Knowledge Center for Chronic Fatigue (NKCV) touting its treatment approach as “not harmful.” The decision is something of a slap at the NKCV and its co-leader, Professor Hans Knoop, a psychologist and a…

  • Dutch CBT Study for Long Covid Proves that Unblinded Studies with Subjective Outcomes Generate Positive Reports

    Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about a problematic Dutch study that had been funded by a major health agency and was being led by Hans Knoop, a professor of medical psychology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. The study sought to test whether a course of cognitive behavior therapy starting months after a…

  • Dutch Agency Awards Big Biomedical ME/CFS Grant to Judith Rosmalen, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine

    On Tuesday, ZonMw announced the first grant recipients in its program of “biomedical research on ME/CFS”—the initial round of awards from the €11.6 million allocated for the 10-year effort. I wrote on Monday about the resignation earlier this month of a patient representative involved in the grant-making process, a move that raised concerns about the…

  • Dutch Agency to Announce ME/CFS Research Awards After Committee Resignation of Key Patient Advocate

    ZonMw is an independent Dutch organization that receives significant government funding for a variety of healthcare-related research projects. On April 25th—tomorrow—it is expected to announce the recipients of €11.6 million in grants for ME/CFS research. This announcement regarding ZonMw’s ME/CFS program is the result of a lengthy process that began ten years ago with a…

  • FITNET-NHS Falls Short in Recruitment Drive

    Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician and star researcher, has weighed in with an interim analysis of FITNET-NHS, her trial of online cognitive behavior therapy for adolescents with what she calls CFS/ME. Poor Professor Crawley! Despite her ambitious goal of enrolling a whopping 734 participants, early recruitment fell way below expectations.…

  • Recent Posts on Dutch Stuff from Simon McGrath and Lou Corsius

    Last week I wrote about the questionable decision by Dutch health funders to support a new research project from Professor Hans Knoop, a high-profile member of the CBT/GET ideological brigades. Although full details were not available, the project appeared to presume that post-Covid syndrome patients could benefit from cognitive restructuring designed to prevent them from…

  • 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…