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There are plenty of better words if you know what your words mean!

I had not appreciated that Daniels had been tweeting out of line. That looks like a pretty damning admission: 'strong proponent for #CBTworks in medical conditions'. Hardly what Ilora Finlay called interested but disinterested. Why on earth was she not down as having a competing interest right...

I am afraid I am not motivated to look more closely than the abstract since it tells us nothing other than that for some reason BPS people also like to believe in joint hypermobility as the B bit. From what I have read the evidence is against any association of joint hypermobility with anything...

Yup.

I had clearly misremembered which number went with the Canadian criteria.However, it is interesting to note the word 'minimum'. Talking to Luis Nacul my impression was that they thought 0.2% was probably a fair estimate of the true prevalence - presumably the expectation is that a significant...

This statement indicates the low level of analysis: Women have a higher lifetime risk of inflammatory immune conditions such as chronic pain, chronic fatigue and autoimmune disease. There is little or no evidence for chronic ('primary') pain being inflammatory. If it was it wouldn't be called...

It sounds like something anyone could pull out of the textbooks as a trendy idea, no more than that. It is also rather full of holes. Bacteria stimulate TLRs much better than viruses and ME does not occur after bacterial infection so much as viral. Covid does not show much cytokine storm. And so on.

I don't think it actually fits together. People feel they are in PEM after exertion at rest. They feel too ill to want to do anything. In a way a can't see how you can subject someone in that state to a second CPET at all. PEM is not just not be able quite to score as high on an exercise bike...

My memory is that the formal epidemiological study by Nacul, Phebe et al estimated 0.2% for narrow Canadian-type criteria, which would be about 130,000 for UK. Also judging from numbers that I have encountered and GP friends have encountered I think significant long term ME must be present in at...

And the Cochrane lady Dr Flottorp was so keen on this. It is clear who needs the therapy here. Just stand on your paper and tell doing LP to STOP.

I would echo Trish's caution. Essentially nothing is known about the pathophysiology. The CPET studies do suggest some difference in metabolism in the context of exercise but I am sceptical that they tell us anything about PEM. I certainly do not think any conclusions can be drawn in relation to...

My only insight into the people involved is that I know of some of them and there are far too many of them. A serious project would not have more than three professors at most. You never get any sort of sensible science with more people than that trying to make decisions on design. This looks...

Sounds sensible from the extracts. Good to see something as measured as this in New Scientist. Not sure where Strain gets this from: For example, graded exercise therapy helps those with pneumonia-like impacts, but can be harmful for those with the CFS/ME-like condition, says Strain. What...

This looks pretty empty of content or value to me. Even the headline explainer does not make sense: A major new £2.2m government-funded research project to improve the treatment, causes and symptoms of Long COVID in non-hospitalised patients. We don't need to improve the causes of Long Covid...

You shouldn't desist, but I doubt you will anyway!

Indeed. The problem with GRADE is that the pseudo arithmetic is applied strictly by organisations like NICE and Cochrane. NICE got the right result but it was more or less by chance that GRADE had adoption to get there.

I agree with the analysis the mechanics but my understanding is that the quest is for a definition of a specific source of bias relating to treatment delivery. Lack of blinding causes problems specifically with subjective outcomes but is classified under lack of blinding nonetheless.

If a tool is just a list of things to remember that is fine. The problem with tools like GRADE is that they attempt to extract general rules about the impact of bias on reliability using a bogus arithmetic.

Designed-in bias?

What about treatment-inherent cognitive bias? All sorts of treatments might induce cognitive bias through more general means but it seems that what is wanted is a category for bias where its induction is inherent in specific forms of treatment?