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One reason why I doubt hidden microbes are involved is that if they were I would expect at least an occasional case where the microbe showed itself in terms of 'winning' rather than just hiding away causing a nuisance. Most hidden infections can become overt in people who for some other reason...

Have you ever been involved in this process @rvallee? As you know, I have. I have done pilot studies and larger follow-on studies. At each stage you have to do a study that is capable of producing a meaningful result. This study, much like PACE, was incapable of producing a meaningful result. So...

I have tried to make sense of the figures giving the results. Other than the fact that they seem to show lots of people improving over time I cannot make anything of them. This seems like a study done by people who think they are doing a trial but have no understanding of how trials are done...

I have not seen a scale like that before. As you say it looks vague and confusing. I cannot think that the 7 grades are justified. More commonly people use about 3-4 - same, a bit better, much better, and yes should include worse.

I guess I didn't answer those questions because I don't know the answers. To the first: maybe not. To the second, maybe, but it is hard to think what would lie behind a persistent signalling problem without showing itself some there way.

You can do without a control group for a very well documented disease at times. But for this situation a study without a control is worthless. There is no justification in recruiting numbers like this if the study tells us nothing and the treatment is potentially hazardous. I still do not...

My guess is that the important thing is to find a GP that listens. I don't think you can get that from emailing practices with queries. What my wife would do (she is much better at this than I) is to wander into a few shops which don't look very busy - maybe charity shops, independent chemists...

It seems that 'trained immunity' was invented after I retired - in 2011 - by some people working in a company called Trained Therapeutix. The Wikipedia entry does not fill me with any enthusiasm.

As an immunologist, I had never actually heard of 'trained immunity'. Maybe it's a Twitter thing?

It's the basic trainee level scrutiny I find a bit lacking.

Worthy of Sir Humphrey?

From what I have seen I agree that this is better than before and not bad. BUT it does seem very amateur and full of suboptimal statements. Why is this so, when if S4ME had been asked to produce a document I am pretty sure it would have been professional and got the detail right?

In the last week or two we have heard of AI machines that can produce stuff that sounds almost as if it was written by a human. Today we discover that there are humans that can produce stuff that sounds almost as if it were written by a bot - but not quite that good.

Depends a bit on the quality of the magic I guess. One thing I note was that people either showed improvement or 'no effect'. But since they were likely to have improved anyway maybe improvement is 'no effect'. And 'no effect' really means failure to improve or worse - quite likely a bad effect.

Maybe Dr Vousden has not read the literature that shows that almost complete wiping out of T cells for a period of many years with a monoclonal antibody (CAMPATH 1H)had no useful effect on human rheumatoid arthritis. The problem with medical research these days is the complete ignorance about...

There is something about the way brains and lymphocytes work that I have not seen discussed in computer systems. Both of them generate millions or billions of 'shapes' that are not digital, nor even analogue but I think multiple inflection-based. It is not so much topology as lock and key -...

The presentation is unprofessional in various respects. I find it hard to see the ethical justification for giving anticoagulants, which carry significant morbidity and mortality, in a trial that does not look as if it can give any useable results.

There are lots of political reasons for not being an author. I have been in that position. If one has been involved in getting a project set up in some other capacity or is expecting to act as referee or things like that. It suggests some potential conflict of interest. I have made decisions...

With due respect, @Medfeb this seems a bit like asking the 'community' to make a formal enquiry into how Penelope is getting on with her shroud-weaving in Ithaca. The community have made it abundantly clear that they think this is a cop out of gigantic proportions and I suspect no sane person...

Must be on that new channel, certainly not BBC.