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Subjective assessment can be more "reliable" if the trial is truly double-blinded. An easy one would be in homeopathy, where the homeopathist could prescribe a certain mixture, but the patient could easily be presented with plain water (that is, as opposed to water that had been shaken and...

When it comes to checking facts, there are different levels of veracity. "Everyone knows" is probably at the bottom:" it's on the internet" is only a step above: "it was published in The Lancet" might be a bit above that ... and at the absolute summit of reliability is "Esther says".

It looks on the table as though White only sent the information that there were 21 people in the age group 60+ (i.e. 3%), and it looks as if Couch distributed them across the age groups 65-74, 74-84, 85+ to match the Bowling spread. I don't see any other direct information about the ages of the...

Is he/she sure that PPS stands for Persisting Physical Symptoms and not Persisting Psychological Shams?

I feel so sorry for you and folk like you. My son has ME as well, and is a bit more limited than I am, so I really do appreciate my good fortune. But I did fall and break my hip a while back - osteoporosis is a potential side-effect of long-term steroid use. So I'm having to be careful (my...

I'm really late to the party here, but I've been on prednisolone since 2005. It was given to me when I went down with polymyalgic rheumatica. Pretty rapidly the dose dropped to 10mg, but I've stayed at that level more or less ever since. I have eased down many times, and have actually come off...

I know I'm being too kind to them, but I think it is likely that some of the larger team were not aware of what was happening, or had no ability to affect it. I know that in such circumstances people should resign, but if you have a family and a mortgage, and very senior people are making the...

In truth, people seem wedded to the idea that to get an average you must add numbers and divide (the mean). Back when I was teaching, down came the edict that when we wrote reports and entered exam marks, we should also write down the average mark in the class. The maths dept explained that the...

I am nothing but grateful for all your inputs, especially when you disagree with me! My reason is simple: I like you, respect you, and know we are on the same side. If something sits uneasily with you, or if you think I have got something wrong, then I need to get it right for people who aren't...

Agreed. The trouble is that in the PACE trial there are just too many issues: too many faults: too many poor decisions. I'm trying just to focus on two simple but major errors that in themselves would be sufficient to destroy any proper scientific study. The authors are well-practised at...

We can only guess at their motivation and ignorance, but to me it goes along the lines of them realizing that their results weren't good enough, but, like a fervent believer trusting in the truth of their belief, they felt that something must be wrong with the targets. So when one of them came...

Yes, that's true. But the second video was about the faults in their use of very basic statistics rather than the actual results. My overall idea was that the first video showed that the results were pretty irrelevant – so in that sense, whatever they did with them was meaningless: the scores...

Well, I did say it was the recovery target for that questionnaire. In the third video I intend to cover the "four" criteria - three are questionnaires and one is a diagnosis from a doctor that can be over-ruled by a questionnaire. They didn't require an improvement of 20 points in fact, nor...

You're a maths teacher - nit picking has been surgically implanted in your very essence.

Thanks @Andy : I've just been loading and checking the subtitles and came across it. There's a word I said to myself. I'm trying to find out if I can edit it in Youtube, whether I have to upload it all again, or whether simply to issue an apology underneath! I didn't think many people would be...

Ooooh! Nice one, @TiredSam ! The only question is how many sessions will it take?

Ours is the same. I am thinking of writing to thank Carol, and copy it to my MP, along with the letter to the minister. Then a group of us were thinking of making an appointment to see her. I doubt if it will do much good, but I'm sure the balance is tipping in our favour, so it's time for...

An unpleasant and scary intention, as befits much of the aggression surrounding the Brexit issue.

I have finished my first and very rough draft of a letter to the minister. I don't want it to go out into public view yet as it needs a lot of polishing: any suggestions?

Following on from the debate at Westminster Hall, I wonder whether this should be passed on to the minister (Steve Brine?) as evidence of the sort of difficulty we face in getting the message out there, and of the entrenched opposition in many medical quarters.