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I doubt it has much to do with money. These are machines that have been available since maybe the 1960s, at least since 1980. They do not require the complicated set up of MR imaging although they need a powerful magnet. My guess would be that once you have a machine studies cost rather...

Well, when I was shown these peaks each one was clearly identified as lactate or glutamate or pyruvate or whatever. There was lots of them. As far as I know each molecule has a particular signature that is known beforehand.

I cannot answer that for sure. However, in the 1980s I worked in the next lab to people who did MR spectroscopy and they showed plots with peaks for pretty much any metabolite you might be interested in as far as I remember. If cells are really running out of ATP or pyruvate or whatever it...

I don't get the impression that the hypothesis is well enough formulated as yet to be testable by anything much. If it was I suspect it would be most easily testable by simple MRI spectroscopy of tissues before and after exercise. If the problem is really a shortage of energy supply from a...

I can't get my head around this yet. But one thing bothers me. When we meet viruses and other infections almost always our metabolism goes UP - so we get feverish - isn't that the way it is?

Interestingly MS only attacks nerves in the brain and spinal cord. CIDP attacks nerves outside the brain and spinal cord - in the arms and legs.

Well, OK, but Ariens is not a clinical haematologist, and his argument is pretty feeble. There is nothing wrong with trying to get rid of something that might be doing harm. The problem is the quality of evidence, not that. Dr Banerjee would do, but again, he is arguing a technical theoretical...

There is something spooky about this to me. Here is a BMJ article written by the 'investigations editor' whoever that might be. It quotes charities and lawyers but I didn't catch any sign of a medical scientist opining? When I have talked with medical colleagues I have been met with a genial...

I think etanercept has been tried in ME before with no useful effect. Perispinal administration sounds highly risky to me and unjustified in the absence of any evidence of inflammation.

UK government due to go down by supper time I think. Whether a new leader will shuffle again, who knows? There is likely to be a major clearout I think.

Written by a student!

That looks a fairly good account of why oxaloacetate isn't going to do anything. It also looks like fairly good account of why this is almost certainly a scam.

On some days politics is existential! But so is tennis today and there's no rule against tennis is there? Nadal for champion!!! And that Ons lady is impressive.

This seems to me quite a good outcome. Javid was a good person to get an appropriate ME advisory group together but having said that he did not think the NHS needed any more money I cannot see how his continuation in post was going to get anything done!

Maybe the doctors are too and the clinics cancelled.

I think effect sizes are for something different. They are crucial but not related to primary outcome. Maybe we should take four scenarios with an relatively objective but indirect outcome measure O that is chosen because it seems reasonable to expect it to show an effect if the treatment is...

Only if a trial is the single final arbiter of whether or not a treatment is to be judged useful. In reality trials are very rarely in that category, although for any given treatment there are often one or two trials that come close to it. Quality of life in itself has not been used as a...

If Berlin Cures are right the test is probably no use in any situation - i.e., if it does not pick up antibodies reliably. I suspect it is more likely that the antibodies are not there in any meaningful sense.

Breath tests are done by gastroenterology units on the NHS. But as a caution, read the paper attached - or abstract. The reliability of these tests is probably poor. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856094/

This is IiME territory - they might have local contacts.