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Adequate controls for surgery always present difficulties. However, a control does not have to be a simple 'placebo'. It needs tone some alternative scenario such that comparison with the test treatment reliably indicates that outcomes following test treatment are actually due to that specific...

It seems that Dr Greenhalgh is not aware that she will be cynically manipulated by government only too happy to have cheerleaders in nice short outfits to match their cutting funding equally short while making it look longer. What is the point in funding a service that has node what it is...

I am not sure it provides any answers. If I remember rightly it is a retrospective review without any controls. That just tells us nothing.

Precisely my thought. I don't know why Charles is advocating a 'multidisciplinary' approach. Multidisciplinary, inmate or less all contexts, just means nobody in charge. I spent my life avoiding having anything to do with it.

It seems pretty clear that it was known that he was test positive earlier than we have been told. In the video he looks seriously sick. His lung function is not up to just standing and taking a mask off. And that is on steroids. I have no idea what will happen but at 74 I would expect it to...

It could be a Monty Python caricature of a scientific paper. I like the idea pretending to deliberately start out with the intention of studying just one case. Anyone who writes like this and expects anyone else to take them seriously must be very dim. (I hear echoing in my ears 'he thinks we...

An awful lot of words that say nothing more than anybody could make up without knowing anything more than they had read in the newspaper. The continuing assumption that foursome reason people must need exercise is bonkers. The whole thing is entirely driven by the politics of empire building...

I think it might be quite hard for an aide to infect 30 people at a party like that. More likely the waiter.

So who was the spreader there?

It is maybe of interest that if CBT were to be used in trials as the 'Standard Medical Care' control (being the current 'best practice' according to some) then we might see some rather different results. What would be even more interesting would be to have a circle of trials in each of which...

He is not that super spreader, (who spread a week or two ago) but he might turn out to be the subsequent supersuper spreader.

My impression is that Garner has no idea that to call someone a guru in this context is to display naivety. Lynne Turner-Stokes isn't really a guru sort. She is very matter of fact and went into rehab because she was unimpressed by the gurus in immunology (she told me that at a job interview)...

It is difficult to get the point across because a surprisingly high proportion of people in academia do not understand what makes one theory more valid than another. Most academics are satisfied if everyone agrees an idea is good and make no demands on it actually standing up to rigorous test...

A colleague of mine had the rather useful phrase 'has an inflated idea of their own importance'.

Indeed, and they seem so ingrained in recent medical culture.

One can wonder but for me this is just the sort of extrapolation from normal mental function to abnormal mental function that is illegitimate without understanding mechanisms. It is very like the way people extrapolate from normal immune function to abnormal, e.g. 'autoimmune' function when they...

I don't think we have any evidence it is not. Butnthe key question is what we mean by 'subconscious mental'. If mental is conscious then there is none. If mental means all the processes that lead up to conscious events then how wide do we take that? For me the key issue is that although it is...

That looks a bit like the epilepsy society taking the opportunity to say that non-epileptic seizures are just what the psychiatrists say they are. The more I see of information put out by disease support groups the more it seems heavily laden with politics.

I forget these things but I think febrile convulsions are epileptic with widespread discharge. It is just that there is no persisting focus.

During seizures EEG activity is likely to be distorted by electrical activity from muscles. But for true epilepsy there is widespread discharge well above normal levels. For non-epileptic seizures there will be activity but not over and above that expected from normal type brain activity plus...