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I do think some people (including myself) think different amounts of criticism should be given according to the status of the person. So I think a senior academic such as a professor should be able to justify everything they do. But with a junior researcher or a PhD student I sometimes think...

I agree rather than speculating about motivations we can look at the detail of the work. I find motivations very hard to understand. As someone with no great career motivation I am constantly surprised by people who do stuff to help their career rather than because its fun, interesting or just...

But we should remember that Crawley is quick to attack work she does not agree with. I'm not sure what the 'soft' sciences are but I've seen vigourous debate between psychologists and economists. I think some academics feel threatened by questioning and transparency from those outside of their...

I was assuming that if certain foods/supplements had an effect it would be by rebalancing a process within the body. Hence, wouldn't be expected to cure but may alleviate symptoms. Which is why I was interested in the comment in the paper around the improvements being maintained and whether...

I think there have been a few approaches to this and I do wonder if they have potential. Basically looking at the cycles that appear to be going wrong and trying to support them. I thought that at one point Ron Davis and Naviaux had been suggesting such approaches although I think with no...

I was wondering if more measurements than just the FSS scale were being used. One of the issues that has been raised with other open label trials is the use of subjective measurements. It would be good to see more objective activity data being measured to get a better picture of the effects. I...

Patents can take many years to be granted but the information in them can be published after filing. I think after a year the patent application is published (but that could have changed).

The Pdf document says that Will Marsh is the author and he is head of media. So it looks like something from the universities PR department.

I would really like to know who in Bristol University issued the statement and who authorized it. It seems to me that Bristol university are saying there is nothing wrong with the ethical approvals (or lack of ethical approval in one case) for Crawley and Sterne's work. Lets not forget Crawley...

I wonder what the psychologists in the audience made of that. (or would have made of it if she had a patient label rather than an academic label).

That is basically PACE with CBT/GET as well as Smile. Crawley's trials are designed to use this effect to get a positive effect. I think there is also a timing issue in when forms are filled out. If you give people the chance to send forms back over a month or two they may wait till they are...

I think some of the idea behind the longitudinal studies where they follow families and their health for decades gives a better picture because its not retrospective and biased by looking for bad events when people are ill. But it is very hard to get over the huge number of potential factors...

I thought the angle of looking at digital tools was great as it suggests ways that employers can be inclusive and do things to help people work and collaborate.

The Cochrane response to Robert Courtney's comments are very telling. They basically say they will ignore the outcome switching in the PACE trial and rate it highly anyway and also give unconvincing excuses for their own outcome switching.

This was a talk that he gave a while ago on mitrocondria and ME

The UK biobank have shared samples with Karl Morten at Oxford University to look for metabolites & other chemical clues. http://cureme.lshtm.ac.uk/biobank-samples-received-dr-karl-morten/

I think it means they don't have sufficient people in the trial to show their expected effect size reliably so they talk about multi-arm stuff where they basically say because CBT and GET are similar we can agregate results.

Whenever I see the phrase Evidence-based treatment associated with ME it tends to be being used to promote CBT and GET which have really weak evidence because the trials are so bad. Good treatments that really work don't seem to need to push such labels.

I think it is a bad idea. I can see it could cause serious relapses.

I think there was a German team looking at antibodies who were doing a trial with some sort of blood filtering to try to remove anti-bodies. It should work more quickly than Rituximab but for a much shorter time. I think there was talk about doing that along with Rituximab so that any antibodies...