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Well there is the man with the orange hair, but within medical science, no. What is most remarkable here is the transparent misrepresentation of the RHA report.

An interesting technical point occurred to me that I thought I would post here, as it is relevant to the quotes about unbounded trials. PACE was too big. It might seem odd that a trial could be too big but I think it was. In general, unblinded trails are phase 1 or phase 2 trials designed to...

The nature of a guideline of this sort is that it has to be a guideline for anyone where diagnosis X is a major option or perhaps the closest available option to one of any number of clinical presentations. The guidelines has to cover everyone in a ball park. Otherwise there will be people for...

It in't the common sense model. It is the popular prejudice old wive's tales model, as we all know. And, as Lewis Walpert said, science is about discovering that the world isn't necessarily the way common sense (or old wives) might paint it. Often it is unexpected.

So people with ME, diabetes and arthritis have different perceptions about their illness? What a surprise. How can a paper get published with no data in the abstract? The more drivel that comes out of Bath and Bristol the less credible any of their stuff becomes.

Having lost my laptop on Swissair I was prompted to dig around in old laptops with dead batteries. Heathrow found my current laptop (after I had bought a new one, which I am arguing I needed anyway) but I discovered one of the old ones from 2015 would work despite no battery if connected to...

There are more complex reasons why the population recruited in PACE were inappropriate but the argument about being unethical to apply results from a wider group to a narrower group does not work in general in logical or scientific terms. Nobody knows whether the term ME defines a group with...

The NICE committee consists of a good number of members who have a clear understanding of the evidence. There may be a similar number who have a muddled idea of the evidence but they will have to argue on the basis of evidence, because the NICE rules require that. My understanding s that last...

Mm. As you probably know I see that as a red herring. There is no evidence for efficacy of CBT or GET for any group as far as I can see. The Oxford studies excluded did not provide reliable evidence either. I was surprised that this was not obvious to AHRQ. The lesson of the Harvard document...

This is a review article titled to sound as if it is a data paper. As a review article it is poor. It is muddled and incorrect at almost every stage. It is impossible to work out what pathogenic mechanism is being proposed if any. The mention of psychological stress is very strange. I don't...

Yes, I appreciate that. I was more musing on the general phenomenon. And I guess this is why they do not say evidence-based because they know it isn't yet suggest it all the same. This is what I think would be particularly useful for the NICE committee to see. It shows that what appears to be...

I had not realised that this appeared in a commercial 'news' rag rather than as simple blog. I would be highly suspicious that this guy has been set up at least to some extent. Everyone is flattered by being used by media. Somewhere behind this I suspect there is a friend of a friend of you know...

@Medfeb, I assume you have the package. I can just see the flyer - which is about how to manage your CFS, so the issue is the management bit. I think it would be very useful to have this as evidence for the NICE guidelines committee @adambeyoncelowe, @Keela Too, @saranbonser. It provides a...

The wikipedia article is fun because it shows what nonsense 'embodied mind' is. The problem is much worse than untestability. It is that people are using words in ways you cannot use them, because they do not understand what they mean by them. The idea of embodied mind is that you can explain...

I don't think the embodied cognition concept actually needs any evidence to discredit it. It is meaningless. Of course that does not mean that the body does not influence the mind. It determines entirely what is in the mind. But what has that to do with embodied cognition? It's the girl...

Be careful to wear a Tarnhelm David, I wouldn't want your brain damaged.

Maybe Harvard should be informed that even the UK House of Commons has just voted to drop CBT and GET.

I wish this chap well with his struggle to det well. However, ther more I consider it the more out of place it seems to me for a support charity to post stories like this. I do not think one of the arthritis charities would be likely to post stories of people getting better with unproven...

The key step is establishing whether or not a potential conflict results in a real conflict with the common good. That has to be decided by peer review of things like the Chaldea scale and Oxford criteria and their proposed use. In the case of PACE, peer review at MRC and NIHR should have...

We have discussed this in the past and I think it is fair to say that being a patient is not a conflict of interest. The interest of the individual patient is prima facile the interest of all patients , which is the only legitimate interest to 'conflict' with. Irony may have been intended but...