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It looks to me as if the lead author for the new review will be a physiotherapist, Nicholas Henschke. That seems a bit crazy since the problems with the last review stem from having a physio as lead author. If you are a physio and you write a review of physio that says there is no evidence it...

Well I'll be darned. It shows how important it is to keep voicing concerns.

Trouble is, I cannot really make anything of these generalised cryptic responses. This is a real life situation and although professional colleagues may see me as breaking 'protocol' it seems to me that for the benefit of the patients we need to call a spade a spade. I cannot understand why...

I am not familiar with the work of the Centre beyond Faulkner's writings, which include probably the best account of the historical problems of PACE we have. This publication served me as a primer for PACE analysis some years back and it is always worth referring back to. It mentions the...

I don't understand that though. It points out that the medical profession have things roughly right - obesity is a major health hazard and the only way to deal with it is eat less. Doctors may seem unsympathetic but it is difficult to know what they can do if food availability and advertising...

I am not sure if you prefer not to read my posts @Hilda Bastian, or whether you just find them too close to home to respond, but sadly this looks to me more and more like the blind leading the blind. What is needed is clear thinking. Clear thinking is easily recognised, as is muddled thinking...

I think one could probably say 'Everything in this article is wrong'. Diets work fine, if they are stuck to - and that is all anyone ever claimed. Overweight and obesity are health problems at least as serious as cancer. The article is exactly the sort of irresponsible sabotage that it...

IgG therapy for ME seems a muddle. I cannot see any point in giving it to people with slightly low IgG levels or subclass levels - which are common enough findings and unlikely to have anything to do with immunodeficiency'. IgG has been given for autoimmune disease in the past but mostly that...

Not really. You cannot meaningfully compare a pretreatment with follow-up in an uncontrolled trial and treat a difference as 'statistically significant'. Statistical significance is based on a null hypothesis that populations are the same and a finding that they cannot be. But it is absurd to...

The lab story looks cast iron to me. I had always assumed it would be the lab since it is too much of a coincidence that a bat coronavirus epidemic should start in the one town in the world with a huge lab working on bat corona viruses. The DNA trail looks incontrovertible. Presumably un til now...

Yes, Hilda made the point that even bad trials can be worth reviewing if they show things like harms or in this case refute a theory. But maybe it is an indication of the toothless nature of Cochrane that as a rule it does not seem to venture into such negative territory. Are there many reviews...

I am beginning to think that the rift in which the hot potato lies is less to do with threats to the BPS crowd and more to do with a threat to the Cochrane community itself. There has been mention of difficulty in persuading people that exercise might not be good for everything. The people who...

90,000 bats would shit there every day. You would find as many viruses wherever there are bats but maybe this was the easiest place to go digging the shit out from.

I don't think we actually have evidence of response to anti-virals. Moreover, I cannot make sense of Naviaux's comment there - he says that responses must indicate persistent virus but then suggests that the drugs are working through other routes - so where is the evidence for persistent virus?

Yes, antinuclear antibody rates have been reported and the consensus is that there is nothing specific to find. I don't have any references bt I think Lipkin and ME Biobank amongst others have looked. Venables looked in the 1990s and found anti-phospholipid antibodies but not ANA I think.

But surely, Hilda, the only way to deal with this is to be honest about the reality. As you know I have absolutely no competing interests here. I write papers on neurophysics and go birdwatching. I am intrigued by a situation with on one hand a group of patients making an intelligent critique of...

While we are about it it might be good to make sure Kay Hallsworth isn't Kate Hallsworth's auntie. Outside Yorkshire it is not a particularly common name. The ME community has been accused of mounting an organised campaign but when it comes to cronyism and back scratching behind the scenes it...

I don't think that addresses my query, Hilda. She obviously had a major commitment to it if she was a 'specialist' in that area. Well, that seems to indicate that whoever delivered the brief believed that there is an 'activist community' beyond people interested in good ME science. That is...

I am confused by all this stuff about Kay Hallsworth. I must admit it seemed odd for someone who was very grateful to rehab services for recovering to suddenly pop up unknown in the ME world. I also note that she has been involved in medical services not just as a patient but also very much as a...

As I said, some viruses like EBV persist and that is normal. If they are associated with illness they are associated with measurable pathology (not just antibody titres, pathology). So if ME shows no pathology of the sort we see with viral damage to cells then it doesn't fit.