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Thanks to a member, we can post some excerpts, focussing on things that may be news to members:

An issue is that the people up to helping train the next generation of doctors probably are going to do their best to look and sound perky on the day they go into the medical school. Imagine if the med students had to go to the home of a person with very severe ME/CFS and just sit quietly in...

More from the discussion this was written to criticise another team's effort at a meta-analysis, due to I think they all have some more fundamental problems. There's no mention of dropouts in the paper, no exclusion of studies on the ground of an intolerable risk of bias. And fair enough too...

So, here we go, for the discussion: So, you can either take the endorsement of this multi-study review with all the bells and whistles of the Cochrane tools and processes but no objective outcomes. It finds moderate certainty evidence that the exercise modalities reduce fatigue in the short...

When you have an active control (CBT, moxibustion, point application), the exercise interventions have similar results. We've heard that before. Long term followup 12 weeks is hardly long term followup, but it looks like only two studies did it, or at least only two studies reported on some of...

13 studies, 8 of them with a publication date in 2015 or later (and therefore new studies since Cochrane Larun et al's search). Outcomes are mostly surveys, short followup times. There are a few molecules measured e.g. neuropeptide y. All studies except one judged to be of low risk of bias...

There's potentially a lot of studies out there. A large number of the studies were excluded because it was determined that they did not study chronic fatigue syndrome, although I haven't seen anything about how they identified chronic fatigue syndrome.

tldr: they did all the things: including this: but not this:

The Cochrane Larun et al review gets a shout out - spreading disinformation across the globe. Tai Chi - the movement practice that looks like a slowed down version of a martial art Qigong - as far as I can work out, tai chi is actually a sort of qigong. It seems to be a general term for...

Given that Magenta had objective outcome results that aligned with subjective ones and given the abject failure of the GET therapy, with deteriorations in activity levels on average, and the very unusual admission that a suicide attempt may have been linked to the study, it at least constitutes...

Well that's a depressing collection of letters. And that's where things get really bizarre - an illness characterised by no structural reason for the dysfunction that has a structural reason for the dysfunction.

That sounds frightening @MatthiasRiem. Some of the committee are from ME/CFS charities? I note that the process is aiming to provide guidelines for adults only - which conveniently sidesteps the Magenta study. But of course the guidelines will be applied to children. I wonder if the charities...

Some people want to ignore all exercise therapy studies that don't have people diagnosed by a criteria that requires PEM. I'm pointing out that if they get what they want, we would have no recent trial evidence that I know of and would have to ignore what I believe is one of the strongest...

If we want to use Magenta as new evidence of GET not only not working but causing subjective and objective physical and emotional harm (and we absolutely should because it is very powerful evidence) then we have to accept that we can get useful information from trials that don't use our...

I'm not sure how you can say that Medfeb. There is evidence of that, and no evidence otherwise. In Hilda's blog there are paragraphs about how things have changed with the recognition of PEM and the review is constantly referred to as 'outdated' rather than flawed. There is very little talk of...

Of course all of the issues are relevant, but some have wider reaching impacts than others. And some aren't evidence of unscientific practice. So far, the people involved in the new Cochrane review process who have spoken seem to have focussed on one single issue, claiming that the issue is...

Thanks @Medfeb The Larun et al review refers to chronic fatigue syndrome, not ME/CFS. It's a moot point whether PEM is required for a diagnosis of CFS. They were answering the question they set out to answer. The lack of use of a diagnostic criteria including PEM is an argument for there...

But, we are not talking about what the best definition of ME/CFS is. That's a different question. We are talking about whether the BPS researchers did something fundamentally unscientific by doing a trial using a selection criteria that did not require PEM. And whether a review can be...

And I think this must be why decision makers in Cochrane don't think that there are any grounds for withdrawal of the review. They just don't believe that there really is any risk of harm and they still believe, regardless of the lack of evidence, that exercise helps. Perhaps they really do...

The problem with your hypothetical example is that you are assuming that the researchers could easily tell the difference between a human and a rat, and that that distinction makes a difference with respect to their response to treatment. An alien from an advanced civilisation might be...