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I have no idea how the management works but there does not seem to be much scrutiny of what goes on in terms of the actual reviews. I am not aware of any alternative organisation and I doubt there would be.

No, a hidden agenda for medicine as a whole. Maybe to do with knocking pharma and rooting for home grown therapies. Cochrane was set up by a GP rather than an academic, as I understand it.

The originator of Cochrane, Iain Chalmers, now has a position in a Norwegian institution, maybe NIPH. Two different Norwegian organisations seem to crop up in relation to key Cochrane names. I do not know quite what is going on but there does seem to be a major Norwegian link up. That would fit...

I have got the impression that Cochrane had a hidden agenda from the start but it remained hidden and perhaps benign for years. As for the SMC it may be hard to define exactly what that agenda was. If there is a power battle recognised by Cochrane board members then things are clearly way out...

Antibodies cannot be activated or primed. They just bind to what they like to bind to. What may be relevant is that the binding in itself does not do much in most autoimmune diseases. (there are exceptions where the antibody binding actually alters pathways.) In order to get inflammation the...

I am pleased to say that we can be fairly sure the NICE committee will take no notice whatever of this!!

Presumably this is a departmental advert page so maybe Dr Sharpe wrote it.

I think you have to be very careful about this sort of thing and probably keep clear of it. TripAdvisor does this and has a major vetting system and even so has run into major legal problems. In the medical and academic world there are sites called Rate the Professor or Rate the Doctor and...

I don't see any prospect of hospitals feeling their reputations are at stake. If they ask for an expert opinion they will be told that what they are doing is fine and the patients are just being difficult. From a human nature perspective I see no prospect of getting a wanted result. And my...

I am not sure what animal models would be relevant. This looks a bit airy fairy to me.

Because in the case of flu the doctors said - oh it's bad flu. So people coped as best they could, knowing what was wrong. For the Royal Free situation the doctor said 'golly this looks like some weird neurological illness that we have never seen before - what could it be!!!?' So it was all...

I a going to EUROMENE this coming week but not CMRC. The programme looks to me about the best selection of what is going on in the UK and a bit of elsewhere you could do. The ME Biobank people at LSHTM are getting plenty of space. Newcastle and the UK Biobank are presenting and Chris Ponting is...

A good point but surely when they caught the flu they would have realised they had flu, and so would the doctors. So they just carried on as normal, having flu.

I am talking of systematic research studies which ought to have picked at least something up in some cases and my impression is that they did not.

But the tachycardia is driven by the autonomic system just as the blood vessel constriction is. If there was a blanket defect in the autonomic system there should be no tachycardia. There might be a selective defect so that constriction did not occur but tachycardia did, but then there should be...

This is what puzzles me. It is what makes me think of the situation in narcolepsy, and in particular the associated symptom of cataplexy. Cataplexy tends to be brought on by laughing and consists of complete inability to move. There is no suggestion by anybody that it is 'psychological' because...

I agree that sensitivity to sound and light are features of ME that you would not find in a random control group. But a neurologist would not usually call these 'sensory symptoms'. That is just a matter of convention but I think 'sensory symptoms' is confusing because it tends to imply other...

My memory of the original text is that it seems to refer to Wessely. It may be simply that Kohn made a slip in confusing the two names. I don't think it is material.

This has been noted before. Kohn was so familiar with 'John's' great work that he had forgotten his actual name.