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I doubt that recollections of an illness 65 years ago are much help in this case. My reading of the literature suggests that this was a viral epidemic and I suspect McEverdy and Baird thought so too, but that in some cases some of the presenting features were clouded by suggestibility either on...

Herd immunity is as long as a piece of string - there is no magic figure. However, a useful figure would be one which is likely to be a watershed between infection fizzling out and infection spreading. That is going to be dependent on the circumstances at the time as well - just as the R number...

I think it may be basically Jerome Burne, the freelance journalist, but it may be a group of like minded people who like Jerome are suspicious of Pharma and medical cant.

Fatigue is defined as the decrease in physical and/or mental performance... I would say back to front again. Fatigue is not a decrease in performance. It is, apart from being unpleasant, the reason for a decrease in performance under certain conditions. It is a bit like saying consciousness is...

Jerome is aware. His wording may not always seem ideal but he does his best to support patient interests.

I don't think anyone knows yet. An important thing to remember is that if the faster spread of the new variant is due to something easily avoided - like talking to people without a mask or touching plates and glasses and not washing hands then if people are careful and avoid these things the...

My reaction would be that this was obviously the situation anyway, even if there was no new variant. The level of spread has been allowed to rise such that we are bound to have more deaths next year than this unless there is complete lockdown for a couple of months. Everyone seems to have been...

Yes, I think we were discussing this in the context of ME. van Elzakker and Younger are not a clinical neurologists as far as I know. As someone who has worked in the field of inflammation I am very unclear what is meant by 'neuroinflammation' and not long ago a neurologist commenting on a major...

I am not sure about that. Are the people proposing neuroinflammation in ME actually neurologists? As far as I can see most are researchers fro other fields with no particular expertise in clinical neurology or pathology. More generally, vocal people talking about mechanisms of disease probably...

Jerome emailed me to say that the papers were being slow to take stuff - presumably with Covexit and Brid-19 and all so he put this on the blog. Hopefully he will get a piece in a daily shortly.

Except is wasn't a controlled trial. Wonder how this came about!

I am interested to know where this quote comes from. It is becoming clear to me that there are two different 'term of art' usages of neuropsychologist. One is this one, which I am familiar with in neuroscience and philosophy circles and one meaning a clinical psychologist dealing with things...

Not bad!

I think you have it right. Maybe it should be written above the door at NICE head office (if it has one). One could quibble about 'due to the intervention' since we want to exclude effects due to an intervention that are not specifically due to some class of mechanism attributable to the...

I now realise that you were quoting from NICE, @Barry. The people who run NICE do not understand this stuff. If they did, they would not use GRADE. But the people who run NICE are not the people who sit on committees and make the decisions so things are complicated.

With great respect, @Barry, you did not take note of what I said about language. Language does not follow the obvious rules we expect. A controlled trial is not a trial with controls. Just as a fastened bag is not a bag with fasteners. You can have a bag with fasteners that don't actually...

And yet they could so easily have left it alone as an issue of little scientific importance in medicine as a whole. The importance must have been the threat to medical authority posed by patients. But the Wizards of Oz have now met the Tin Man and Dorothy.

There is no reason it is impossible to have an RCT where individual therapists personalise what they offer. And if different therapists take part in the one trial, one can look for "therapist effects" to see whether there was much variation in the outcomes between therapists. (From Tom K) This...

You are right to rant. I am pretty surprised that I am still surprised by how clueless so many colleagues are. The BMJ editorial makes an awful lot of people look very very stupid.

To be fair animal studies of normal organ function (like immune cells) have been essential to the development of a wide range of life saving treatments. What has been a huge waste of time is animal models of disease causation.