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My impression is maybe not. The can of worms being opened seems to be about conflict of interest regardless of type of treatment. And the psychiatrists are getting quite a bit of stick. I don't know the details of HPV but Jefferson says nobody does except the company. Hilda Bastian also says...

It's an unholy mess. For the board not to have responded to the criticism of the mental health section they must be incompetent. We all need to wake up and see that the imprimatur of Cochrane is no more authority than anything else. You have to judge for yourself.

I am not sure that there is so much a crisis as a silent slipping into a swamp of mediocrity. The crisis may be coming now - in the sense of confronting just how low things have sunk. Cochrane had a unique reputation as honest broker, but it is pretty clear that this is now defunct. I had been...

This is the sort of nonsensical statement that shows there is no real thought behind this sort of project. It is a bit like saying pain is a key symptoms so not having pain is an important part of the treatment. No, it was what the treatment is supposed to achieve. And the treatment seems to be...

Pity that Chalmers was dismissive when I suggested it was odd that the recent exercise for ME review draft was full of flaws despite being written by the guy who writes these articles with Chalmers about how easy it is to spot bad science. He was particularly affronted that I raised conflict of...

What a load of woo-woo. I am wondering who this Trisha Greenhalgh lady is who has cropped up in relation to Cochrane. Professor of General Practice it seems, at QMUL. With views like this around it is not surprising Cochrane is going down the tube.

This is definitely a big problem but may need a pinch of salt. UCL pestered me for about three years for the results of a trial I had told them had never been started and would not be. I am sure it has gone down as an unreported trial.

Yes, it is a pity that when I wrote back to Fiona Watt saying that there was some concern within Cochrane that all was not well I was not in a position to say that the whole thing is in a state of civil war about exactly this sort of drop in standards.

This looks to be the typical mess where one has to be careful trying to sort good guys from bad guys. I am not sure anyone comes out well. My impression is that Gotzsche may well have a bee in his bonnet about various things that are unhelpful, but on the other hand his critique of the executive...

I think Sharpe is right on this one. He said it was not becoming or it was unbecoming of an MP. That means that it is inappropriate behaviour for an MP with their public position. It has nothing to do with gender. Where he was wrong was to suggest that it might be unbecoming of anyone to point...

Sharpe never disappoints because he constantly reveals how disingenuous he is. How can authors of studies provide expert advice to independent quality assessors? Presumably the advice was on how to notice the good bits of the studies and not the bad bits. It is a bit like a job applicant giving...

There comes a point with this sort of research when you get what I think is called an 'embarras de richesse' - too many good things. If they end up finding that hypermobility is associated with every condition they study the likely conclusion is that they are not measuring hypermobility...

Good to see therapy is given separately from health science.

This is so much what it is all about, I agree, @Esther12. One has to keep asking oneself how rational one is really being. After all it might be crazy to think that Simon Wessely had no idea what he was talking about. And it might be equally crazy to think 100 academics writing to the Lancet had...

It looks as if Cochrane has become just another commercial outfit like everything else in Trumpland. But my suspicion is that this may have been the reality all along, but in a previous world where idealism diluted money making. The problem seeems to be all about vested interest. I think from...

I doubt it. The trial was designed to answer one question and the answer was no.

I think he is retired so he may be some sort of 'honorary associate' or something.

Probably not because there are autoimmune diseases that do not respond - especially if the plasma cells making the antibodies are long lived.

I have said this before elsewhere but it may be fair to say it again here. This is not actually the case in practice and it is not what one would expect in theory either, knowing what we do of how B cells work. The evidence for immune activation triggering autoimmunity is pretty much zero, with...

Some nice comments in there. I am not sure about us knowing less about the female body and women being excluded from research. Certainly in my lifetime. Several of the really big epidemiological studies have been on women - like the nurses study in the States. My memory is that far more work...