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Worth remembering that statisticians tend not to understand anything about blinding of trials. Blinding is there to solve a problem with human nature entering with measurements. Statisticians are often not that good on human nature. Medical students get steeped in it from their first clinical year!

It is taught in clinical pharmacology courses, if I remember rightly at the preclinical stage of basic sciences. When I was taught it we used Desmond Laurence's textbook (Desmond was at UCL). It is part of the basic explanation of why we do double-blind trials. Every medical student has heard of...

I think in all these discussions we need to be open to the possibility that a diagnosis ME/CFS is applicable to two or more very different sorts of illness - that just tick the same boxes.

It was White and Knoop and in the same paper they said that CBT worked through the placebo response!

It may be worth reminding people that when I presented my thoughts about the PACE trial to the University College London Division of Medicine (cardiologists, endocrinologists, haematologists, clinical pharmacologists etc.) nearly ten years ago now the audience unanimously agreed that PACE was a...

But that would mean that the 'wider' population was in fact the narrower population in that regard.

I am doubtful that my Rapid Response will appear. There are none up and I suspect this indicates that none will be put up. The potato is too hot.

Absolutely it would. In clinical pharmacology we use different categorisations all the time. I have done studies on rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory arthritis, seropositive rheumatoid arthritis, active rheumatoid arthritis, arthritis in general - you name it. Asthma is an outdated concept...

That argument is incorrect. You can legitimately apply results from wider criteria to a population with narrower criteria. It is the opposite, true generalisation that is not legitimate. If bones are good for dogs you can assume they are good for whippets, unless you have evidence otherwise...

The problem is that if most patients are not well-enough informed to know what they really want or need you end up with the same old mish-mash. How do you 'prevent' people with ME/CFS getting worse?

Something like that.

No, it should never have been proposed. We know all we need to know from the NICE analysis. It was only ever playing Cochrane's own brand of football where if they are losing they are allowed a free kick with the goalie blindfolded. If the old review was bad enough to justify a rewrite it...

If they were killed in a traffic accident maybe but the cost of organising that would be astronomical - many millions. No because B cells only grow in bottles if you bock normal selection controls - so the population of antibodies produced would be entirely an artefact of the culture system.

I am very unclear what you are trying to argue. We are probably agreed that there are cases of blindness not currently explained by structural pathology. It would be fair to call them functional but that term has been appropriated by doctors who use it to mean conversion disorder, even if they...

It isn't ad hominem. It is pointing out that simple explanations tend to be more likely to apply than complicated ones. Opticians often get things suboptimal.

Ophthalmic problems can heal. Central nervous blindness can improve. And we have no idea what causes these unexplained problems so we have no idea whether or not they can improve.

That might not be at all surprising. Wikipedia says: In accordance with its partial agonism, although naltrexone is described as a pure opioid receptor antagonist, it has shown some evidence of weak opioid effects in clinical and preclinical studies.[6] It is a painkiller!

I suspect you need a better optician. I have had similar problems in the past.

Where does that come from. What is somatic modification if not strudel change? Or by somatic are you meaning psychosomatic? Structural change in cancer occurs without intention and isn't functional so what has intention got to do with it?

That tells us sweet FA. These are not controlled trial data. Of course people will improve with time. It is hard to credit just how bad the research I this field is but it is. This is worse than the Cochrane exercise review.