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My guess is that people with ME in the UK probably spend about £50million on supplements a year. That is enough to run twenty five £10million five year grants simultaneously. We don't even have that number of research departments to give that sort of money to. So maybe it should be five...

Bastian ends with We have to increase our skills at detecting bias, error, and the signs of fear mongering – and remember that it’s dangerously easy to be led astray by someone else’s passionately held conviction. This sounds like an admission of naïvety to me. In my view it is actually quite...

I don't think that is plausible. Remember that in 1970 in the UK every unexplained death had an autopsy, which students and junior doctors would attend so I was very familiar with. One thing that was always done was an examination of the heart for arterial disease. In cases where a GP signed off...

I think we have probably established (elsewhere) that Chalmers and Gotzsche don't get it when it comes to CBT and GET for ME. Bastian might have a slightly wider-angled view I agree. But I suspect she will want to mend fences as well.

We need honesty and reality. Dismissed is the wrong word, but everyone should realise that in science: everyone can be considered as having a conflict, and no one should be trusted Ultimately Bastian, Chalmers and Gotzsche were all interfering do-gooders with a biased view. They may have done...

They were on the wards. There just wasn't so many of them. By and large women either got breast cancer or carried on until their sixties of seventies and had strokes. Maybe older people with coronaries were more likely to die before getting to hospital so the older women (and men) were...

David, be reasonable. I was the medical admitting doctor for the whole of the hospital one day a week. I admitted whoever came to the emergency room with chest pain. They all had the same diagnostic procedures. There were about four male coronaries for each female. If you think about it, if...

The article is clearly designed to make a gender point so I am not sure whether that statement is more than just a statement of the obvious. When I was an intern I had a male ward where half the patients were coronaries. In the female ward it was about a fifth or less. Moreover, the men with...

It wouldn't be a matter of how many. It would be a matter of whether it was necessary to subject women to experiments when men could be used and women who might be pregnant were considered best not subjected to experiment. Clearly a study of uterine cancer would require women but presumably men...

I am not sure what the first comment is about.We are talking about whether or not research was applied equally to mea and women. The vast majority of experiments designed to study disease would apply equally to men and women. New antimicrobials would affect them equally one would think, trials...

That quotes half a dozen odd studies. I cannot see a reason to think they are representative. The text is obviously trying to make a point. If it were really true that women were never studied it would surely not be a question of finding half a dozen studies.

I don't get the relevance of that. I was talking about research experiments. I do not remember as a student in 1968 learning about any experiments just done on men and some of the stuff we were taught was indeed thirty or forty years old then. We used to get taught about Starling's experiments...

I'd like to see some facts on this. What sorts of 'studies performed on men' are people really talking about? Most medical research gathers data from ill people - anyone who is ill regardless of sex. Maybe in the 1920s only men were subject to experimental intervention, maybe like trying ut new...

Maybe but that seems to be a peculiarly US situation. If there had been something to go on ME would've been researched outside the US even if the NIH had strange practices. And it wasn't. I think that is because nobody could get a grip on it. That was certainly my feeling. I did not devote any...

I know Willy and Amolak very well. If they prescribe supplements then I guess what I have said still applies. It does not greatly surprise me.

Indeed, and although it is the brain that decides you are too hot, sensing the blood temperature, it makes you feel that your body is too hot, not your brain.

I agree with @arewenearlythereyet that the argument about sexism does not really add up. The fact that illnesses where there is nothing to find on tests and also there are no objective physical signs (like ME and chronic pain syndromes) are more common in women is just a fact, unless of course...

Is this actually the case, David (@dave30th). I have been in medicine for nearly fifty years and I have never come across any suggestion that. Studies have, as far as I know, always had a sex ration relevant to the condition in question, at least since the early seventies.

I don't know what these doctors actually test for but there is no evidence that any supplements are actually helpful for ME. I very much doubt that any tests relating to the supplements you mention (things like D-ribose and acetyl l-carnitine) tell us anything useful. There is a huge bogus...

What is relevant is if a part of the body is hotter than it normally is in relation to the rest of the body. But that does not have to indicate inflammation. It indicates either increased blood flow or increased local metabolism.