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I would personally strongly advise NHS Scotland against approving this because we have no reliable evidence that it works and we have very good physiological reasons for thinking that drinking salty water will achieve exactly the same effect. If we approve this we might as well approve...

Good psychiatry is awesome and I have had the privilege to come across it. It is humble, pragmatic and knowledgeable and does not give up when things do not work out but carries on until a human solution has been found. It has pretty much nothing to do with psychotherapy of any sort.

This is in fact just nonsense. He does not even identify the crucial difference between controlled trials and blinded controlled trials. He says that most science does not use randomised controlled trials but it does. CERN looking for the Higgs particle had to use a randomised controlled method...

Actually PET shows whatever you tag the positron to (positron emission tomography). That can be any molecule you like pretty much so PET can measure any biochemical process you want. In this case it is measuring binding to a ligand on the surface of microglia I think. It is forty years since I...

Iam afraid this looks like gibberish to me. I cannot see what diabetes has to do with colitis. I think this just shows that weird animal models will do whatever they have been engineered to do.

I give Dr Klimas all credit for taking this seriously. What worries me is that this was ten or maybe twenty years ago and since then nothing has been confirmed that could be called 'an awful lot wrong with the immune system'. I worry that people seeing the film will take it that these findings...

Absolutely, but there has been ever since I was a medical student fifty years ago and before that. How could one not have an interest in this? Giving it a special name is just an admission by Holgate that he hasn't encountered something called common sense.

This is actually a fascinating question that has been bothering me, in a slightly different form, for some months now, in relation to the re-analyses done by people like Tom and Alem etc. on PACE. You run into trouble if you test the same hypothesis lots of ways. Usually that means testing the...

I think Woolie is meaning that you do the same analysis of the same data again but having 'removed the noise' made up of all the other patients. In this case you are not only guaranteed to get a 'positive' result' but guaranteed to have it nice and free of noise.

I agree with Alvin's point, in that if anyone thinks this idea is 'new' they are unlikely to be much use at medical research. Those of us who have been productive in producing new treatments would regard the general idea as so bloody obvious that we have been doing it for decades. And as Alvin...

Tell everyone you know to contribute to this for a Christmas good deed! It would make a huge difference to morale if £25,000 could be raised towards the running costs to keep things going.

I would hope S4ME can register for this. If it is useful for me to attend as a representative (being reasonably mobile) I may be able to do that in January.

I have no doubt that at one time there were some angry statements made, maybe worded in the form of threats even. However, that was at a time when the ME/CFS community felt completely unheard and was face with the MRC funding a dreadful trial. I have difficulty in believing that anything similar...

What I was trying to say is that the speculations that I have are already part of our discussions here on S4ME, or have been elsewhere. We have covered all sorts of options. I do not have anything more to add and do not want to highlight anything particular.

Dear Dr. Edwards, Have you had the opportunity to discuss your speculations with other physicians? Have they shown interest? Is anyone looking into your ideas? I understand that naming folks is out of the question. But I'm just wondering if other doctors or researchers are sharing your ideas...

If, as is the case for the phase 3 study, there is no difference between rituximab and control groups as a whole then there is no good reason to think that hidden within the results there is a responder subgroup. Even a small responder subgroup should show up as some sort of increase in...

That gets to the heart of our problems.

It is hard to email someone and say you think they are oversimplifying! I don't think we are approaching a limit. As knowledge increases concepts can often actually be simplified and made easier to learn because they are explainable. I just think that the whole community have got sloppy and...

I think malaise is a pretty good word. In standard medical language malaise means feeling rotten enough to have to go to bed and maybe pull the blankets over your head. It could be milder but if so the implication tends to be that going to bed might be called for sometime soon. And it can be as...

Reasonable concerns but I would be a bit more optimistic, based on my experience in RA. In reality it is the immunologists themselves who are most guilty of oversimplifying. People who come to immunology with a broad base in other disciplines are likely to do better. Immunology became...