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The publishing of that rubbish paper is very disappointing. I did think when I saw the 'the conference will focus on the biomedical, public health, and behavioural aspects of ME/CFS, and 'attendees at IACFS/ME conferences are primarily biomedical and behavioural professionals', that that was...

:thumbup: @dave30th Old version New version

@hope123, why is the conference so expensive*, given that it is a virtual conference and given and given that further sponsorship has been provided by: Have any other organisations provided sponsorship? It looks as though further sponsors/advertisers are sought. Will the presentations...

Wow. We've been saying for a while that the Lightning Process is basically the same as 'CBT for fatigue', thinking that is a commentary on how absurd, how full of pseudoscience 'CBT for fatigue' is. And yet here are Crawley and Loades and Phil Parker and the rest actually saying the same...

For those for whom an article in German is a bit of a barrier: The scientific paper tells only part of the story - the article suggests that a Long Covid treatment study is planned. The idea is that the drug fixes problems with blood flow caused by autoantibodies resulting from a Covid-19...

Well, vague differences between healthy controls and people with [x] in the use of parts of the brain, or connectivities between parts of the brain are taken as evidence that the people with [x] are thinking incorrectly, are obsessing about symptoms, have faulty ways of thinking caused by...

Sarcasm, AP. Check out the dates - it appears to have been whizzed through the editorial evaluation.

A study from Russia. Interesting that being female was not found to be associated with increased risk of persistent symptoms in this pediatric prospective study, whereas being older and having a history of allergies was.

And address the quality of objective measures too. For example: The six minute walk is, in my view, hopeless at identifying changes in the health of the people most likely to be signing up and sticking with a GET trial, that is people with relatively mild severities. It is highly subject to...

There were 8 patients with IgG tested separately, and then two Swedish groups of patients with IgG pooled.

Jonathan, who is a professor who routinely evaluated many people with joint and muscle pain, is telling us that he thinks that the high level of uncertainty around diagnoses of fibromyalgia means that he finds the prospect of 8 out of 8 patient samples showing a consistent and substantial effect...

They had the 8 patients from the UK, with individual IgG samples used for some studies, and two pooled sets of IgG from Sweden - Supplementary Table 2 suggests each pool had 14 people. I'm not sure of the details, but it certainly does look as though the sample size was considerably bigger...

(This is from my memory of what I read last night in the paper) They tried to find the antigen that the proposed autoantibody(ies) are acting against by testing against a commercially available microarray of 42,000 peptides. They did not find any that showed up consistently. Instead, they...

To prevent more mice suffering, perhaps those people who have dismissed fibromyalgia as simply the invention of hysterical women would like to volunteer to receive injections of IgG from people with fibromyalgia?

My understanding is that these are your questions: where 1 = the bias created by relying on a subjective outcome in an unblinded trial, and 2 = the bias created by cognitive manipulation inherent in the treatment acting on an outcome that does not necessarily reflect any real treatment benefit...

No. The current standard, as exemplified by most literature on the subject and most recently and relevantly by the NICE ME/CFS Guideline evidence review, is that subjective outcomes in unblinded trials constitute low or very low quality evidence of treatment efficacy. If the reviewers in the...

I guess I'd question your fundamental premise. Would a pharmacological treatment be accepted if all the trials showing its efficacy were unblinded and the important outcomes were only subjective? I don't think so. So, why would that be acceptable with other sorts of treatments? Requiring...

I often include researchers names in posts, to acknowledge their role in producing a poor piece of research. In this case, I think it's worth congratulating these authors - they reported what they found in the abstract, with no spin. The outcomes were patient-reported and largely subjective...

It's worth a listen. My impression is that these journalists didn't go very deep, but it feels like quite a step forward for journalists not to have to spend weeks unravelling the politics and science of an ME/CFS-like illness and yet still come to pretty decent conclusions. Good to hear about...

Having seen the rules for what evidence will be reviewed for the forthcoming German ME/CFS Guideline, I think the BPS crowd know that the war to retain control consists of many battles.