Trial By Error

Tag: NICE

  • An Updated Letter to the NICE Chief Executive About the Unpublished ME/CFS Guideline

    I sent the following letter today to Professor Gillian Leng, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). It was a follow-up to the letter I sent on September 1st about the agency’s decision to delay publication of it new ME/CFS guidelines. The letter has now been signed by more than…

  • More Science-as-Promotion from the GET Campaigners

    Professor Trudie Chalder, Professor Peter White and like-minded members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades have appeared desperate in the last year to promote their favored interventions, publishing one shoddy paper after another. This stream of sewage has seemed intended to influence the new ME/CFS clinical guidelines that Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence…

  • While NICE Waffles, US Specialists Publish New Clinical Guidelines for ME/CFS

    Two weeks ago, NICE abruptly announced that it was putting the brakes on publication of its new ME/CFS guidelines—a move precipitated by fierce opposition from key members of the GET/CBT ideological brigades in the British medical establishment. Then last week, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a well-known journal, published a different set of ME/CFS guidelines that—like the…

  • NICE Squares Off Against Royal College Bullies Over New ME/CFS Guidelines

    For many years, campaigners for psycho-behavioral interventions for ME/CFS have accused patients who objected to the research as being anti-scientific zealots. It was always a ridiculous charge, but developments this week have made it clear, if there was any doubt, that these entitled bullies are the ones immune to the actual evidence. The National Institute…

  • The Times Fact-Checks BMJ on NICE Committee; My Letter to BMJ’s Fiona Godlee

    It is not often that a major news organization fact-checks BMJ, a leading medical publisher, in real time. But that’s what happened last week when The Times pushed back against biased BMJ reporting about the committee charged by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) with developing a new clinical guidance for…

  • Three CBT/GET Proponents Quit NICE ME/CFS Guidance Panel as Publication Date Nears

    The new ME/CFS clinical guidance from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is finished—and is to be publicly released on August 18th. In the meantime, this final version has been sent to registered stakeholders—even as three of the 21 members of the committee responsible for the guidance have stepped down without…

  • Lowenstein’s Guardian Opinion; Eliot Smith’s Post-NICE View; Tack’s Take on Blinding Study

    The Guardian has published a lot of nonsense about Long COVID and has provided a platform for people who argue that robust manly thoughts are the path to recovery. Of course, it also published George Monbiot’s powerful columns on the topic, including his rebuttal of silly accusations that he was triggering more Long COVID cases…

  • Hughes-Tuller Comment on Wessely-Chalder CBT Study Rejected by Journal, Posted Here

    Last fall, Professor Sir Simon Wessely and Professor Trudie Chalder were among several co-authors of a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The study purported to prove that years of provision of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to patients with “chronic fatigue” and “chronic fatigue syndrome” proved that the intervention was…

  • A Letter to BMJ From Prof Hughes, Prof Racaniello and Me

    I have sent the following letter to Fiona Godlee, editorial director of BMJ and editor-in-chief of The BMJ, on behalf of Professors Brian Hughes and Vincent Racaniello as well as me. We were responding to the recent editorial regarding the new draft of ME/CFS clinical guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence–as…

  • BMJ Pushes Back Against New NICE Draft

    The BMJ has published an online “editorial” slamming the new draft of clinical guidelines for ME/CFS from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. The position expressed is an interesting one: Non-pharmacological treatments for “complex conditions” cannot be adequately measured by randomized trials, according to the two authors. It is, of course, noteworthy that…

  • The British Association for CFS/ME Switches Gears

    *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 On October 20th, the British Association for CFS/ME issued a document titled “Position Paper on the management…

  • NICE’s Upcoming Draft Guidance on ME/CFS

    *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 The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, is planning to release a draft…