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Nervous is good. Its associated with better performance. That's exactly the point. That's what the researchers hypothesised. As to whether the "abnormal" activity is doing anything useful, the results of this study would seem to suggest not. Much of that "abnormal" activity is not very well...

Again, if you can swing it around, you can say that the "false belief" hypothesis has attracted considerable attention and research dollars, so if it were correct, there should be now be ample evidence supporting it (like evidence of people's "illnesses" getting reversed by CBT or GET). But...

As I understand it, the claim by the BPS mob has never been that MECFS is a genuine psychological illness - not in the sense that say, depression or anxiety are. The claim was that people imagine they have a disease when they actually don't. So what you're actually looking for is evidence that...

Here is the apt participant manual ( I don't seem to have a copy of the therapist's manual for APT):

Hmm. I don't mean to criticise Neil Harrison specifically. A lot of otherwise good researchers who just lose it when it comes to making causal inferences in this field. The study's results are pretty clean, imo. Jonathan's idea that patients might have some disproportionate...

Its quite wily. Its says: This suggests some are more depressed than people with a chronic disease.

Here is the bit that you still need to attend to (from my last post): Remember, trials last for around 1-2 seconds.

From my reading, this article is far from neutral, but is very cleverly written to appear so by paying lip service to some alternative perspectives. But the underlying message is: - CFS patients are different from your average depressed patient because instead of attributing their problems to...

@Jonathan Edwards, I'm not sure about the concept of a "background mindset", it sounds very vague to me. What you're describing seems to be the myriad ways our cognitions are shaped by context. That context can include current health, recent activities, current emotions. But in any case, few of...

All the trials involve the same task - name the colour a word is written in. What differs is whether the word itself provides distracting information or not (e.g., the word blue written in red). it takes around 500ms to complete a control trial, 900ms for the distracting info trials. In your...

Yea, researchers do push the boundaries of what's acceptable. Like not reporting studies or manipulations that didn't turn out as hoped. That's not actually lying, but its still being economical with the truth.

@Adrian's right. Luckily, in an event-related fMRI (which this was), all these things get factored out, because you’re only interested in the regions that differed significantly between your control trials and your experimental trials. Since you’re likely to be having similar thoughts...

Valid point. But then, if I were going to bother to lie, I wouldn't be producing shit articles like those ones. My articles would all have large Ns, low dropout rates and the results would look amazing, with all hypotheses confirmed at .001. The fact that so many studies are shit tells us that...

Nice account, @Cheshire.

Sure. I've been on the drug since early march, and on 1600mg since mid April (up from 1200mg). In the six months before I started the cimetidine, I had quite a few really bad episodes - crashes that lasted 6 weeks plus, with awful flu-like symptoms. Since March, I've had some bad episodes but...

Yes, I think the solution is probably not at the peer review/publication end of things (in any case, that wouldn't work retrospectively). I think it has to come from increasing readers' general scepticism and awareness of potential biases. And teaching anyone who reads or in any way uses other...

Yes, I definitely think there are huge costs to patients with this whole BPS enterprise. Long-term costs associated with incorrect hypotheses that are hard to disprove. But I wanted to point out that actual real patients are actually genuinely grateful to Stone, I've spoken with some. That's...

Liked by Michael Sharpe I see. They're pretty tight, those BPS folks. Still, lots of FND patients are genuinely grateful to Stone for at least acknowledging the existence of their disease and treating them with compassion. His clinic offers some treatment (CBT and physio I think), and many seem...

I'd say yes, if stats were the pivotal issue that distinguished poor from good research. But I think it almost never is. Recently, I've been reviewing research on depression, and have come across truckloads of weak studies. But not one was weak because of the stats. They were all weak for other...

Seems like an interesting contribution. In a previous study, this group found higher average CRP levels in people with post-treatment Lyme disease than in healthy controls. So this study was to see if MECFS patients showed the same pattern. The main finding was that as a group, MECFS patients...