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Another simple point is that if an experiment reveals the cause of some pathological state, you expect to see more or less complete separation of populations. If it really is the single cause, which is quite often identifiable, the separation must be complete. Correlations and slopes and box...

I think it is worth while to look at issues at all levels. I tend to focus on the broad brush but I think the detail is equally important. One simple thing I am wondering about: The paper proposes the general interpretation that peripheral tissues are essentially normal and that the problem is...

Not really. MRI is a highly sensitive indicator of brain inflammation. There isn't any. Inflammation in brain is not hard to pick up. The brain tolerates only slight inflammation poorly. The term ME was coined, not because of what we now call ME but because of neurological signs found in an...

Must they? New Clinical Guidelines favour activity management, not GET. Trial shows activity management as good as GET. Spot on. Jobs for the girls continue.

~We had that in the 1980s. She was called an occupational therapist. `Why does an OT have to become a FACT? We don't want any sort of theory. We want practical advice based on evidence. Not much evidence of evidence here. Useful bits of evidence are things like if you get handrails fitted the...

Maybe it just shows the expected - when you compare two therapy programmes the results always look the same, because they don't reflect any particular therapy.

Indeed, even I found it a bit like a punch in the face.

Yes but it then goes on to say that chronic fatigue syndrome is misleading without pointing out that ME is even more misleading since it describes something that does not occur - brain inflammation. I am pretty sure people recently told they have ME will get a very distorted view from this -...

Hmm. If you have train as a doctor you get used to the haunting at night from personal mistakes - or quit. I still wake thinking of some from 40 years ago. I am not sure I would wake up realising I had stupidly approved a badly designed trial with uninterpretable results.

Maybe to activity management in the form of 'pacing up' - two legs good and all that?

That is pretty strong evidence. The chances that the difference is purely due to chance is one in fourteen. So the chance that it is real is thirteen fourteenths. That isn't good enough to be sure of a beneficial result but it is perfectly good enough to conclude that GET most likely makes...

The situation the UK may now be similar on these points. But I doubt hospital and university ethics committees get paid. It isn't part of the job but having done a stint helps to get bonus pay. But even if they are paid I am not clear how they can be realistically accountable. If five years...

If I had been diagnosed with ME I would probably be terrified by the misinformation on this website. I find this persistent hyping tedious and disappointing to be honest. ME may mean muscle pain and brain inflammation but that is not what the illness is. It would help to point that out. And so...

It does, except that members of an ethics committee are not held responsible through any mechanism. Ethics committees were set up on the basis that they were a good idea. They became compulsory but I don't think members have ever had to commit themselves to behaving ethically themselves, or...

yep

But of course that does not exclude calumny as well!

A good ethics committee ensures this function. A trial that will not produce reliable evidence is unethical, by and large. Unfortunately, ethics committees are a mixed bag.

I actually think it IS dimness. People can trot out arguments like a parrot and never see how they will apply in another context. Apart from anything it is dim to write an argument in an email to someone who clearly knows that the argument is garbage!

Their institutions probably did one way or another. It is standard now. Almost everyone senior in a field is on the editorial board of lots of journals. I forget how many editorial boards I was on. It isn't a big deal. You even get key papers rejected.

I guess the usual way - look for the signal in the disease and see what inhibitors do. There may be TLR-7 inhibitors already. Whether you need to do animal studies first would depend on the detailed logistics I think.