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Looking him up is quite a hoot. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/16/kings-college-london-accused-no-platforming-itsown-lecturer/ Apparently his book was subtitled 'how state benefits affect personality'. Lovely guy. He thinks people on benefits should not have so many children.

Oh, yes I think so. Last time I think it was Harry and the veterans? Before that it was his dad or brother - I forget. And William has just been made an honorary fellow of Royal Society of Medicine by Wessely. (Don't tell anyone but anyone can be a 'fellow' of the RSM by paying £200 a year or...

In this quote 'my diary' simply means my schedule - where I am going to be when and what for. I suspect he is referring to the fact that people are mentioning conferences he is posted to talk at or concerts where he might have been seen on the terrace or ... photoshoots with members of the Royal...

I am going to stick my neck out here. I looked at the new edition of the purple book this weekend. Although it is unintentional I think the presentation may tend to encourage people to go down the sort of line of argument in the letter here. There are masses of references to scientific papers...

I would add that finding T cell clonal expansion within diseased tissues as in MS or rheumatic fever is a completely different thing from finding clonal expansion in circulating cells. Clonal expansion will occur in diseased tissue simply because the T cells that arrive there divide if activated...

The mechanism to avoid self-attack is that the thymus has a system for presenting all self peptides to immature T cells and deleting those that recognise self. A defect in this system occurs in the very rare condition where there is a mutation in a gene called AIRE. However, this is an extremely...

Too bad then that Drs Wessely, Sharpe and Co have taken to using exactly these tactics to contact employers of those who have annoyed them. Talk about pots and kettles. I was talking to someone recently who said that Ben Goldacre goes in for this sort of thing quite a lot -writing to editors...

But the irony is that nobody knows what skill or proper training mean here. No comparison has been done - except the one between King's and Holland where it seemed that King's wasn't much cop if I remember rightly!

I agree that parents have every right to be angry. What worries me is that this will have the opposite of the desired effect. It is not well argued and relies on flimsy evidence from weak citations. Criticism of PACE and adolescent studies is appropriate but to be convincing needs to be well...

'I agree that would likely make people worse.' An interesting statement here - of interest to NICE. Since we have no way of guaranteeing that psychotherapists are properly trained (a concern expressed to me by Simon Wessely) there is clearly no way of being sure that people will not be made...

'What a bizarre and offensive comment for a (long retired) medical academic to make about any colleague.' When a medical academic persistently makes offensive comments about their patients and refuses to accept that their work has fallen seriously below basic standards of methodology I cannot...

'Well a subset of scientists, mostly not experts in trials, at least some of who have pretty strong feelings about the findings. How many trial experts do you think find it a good trial - not perfect but good? ' I think having devised and executed many trials including one where I did both...

I think it has been flagged up in such a way that the people who matter will make sure they educate themselves about the problems. One thing I think is clear is that the people at NICE involved with the guidelines are not going to drift through this without making sure they know what needs to be...

'Well. You are not going to be convinced I can see. Odd that folk want a trial to be retracted because they don't believe/like the results.' It seems extraordinary tome that Sharpe does not seem to understand that things have moved on in the last couple of years. Scores of senior academics...

The man is talking as if he understands nothing. There is nothing matched about two treatments that encourage people to think they are getting better and two protocols that encourage people to think they are going to stay the same. CBT and GET are deliberate placebos. The weird thing is that the...

I realised that my use of the term signalling might not be transparent. Nothing like dialogue to get on the same page. In 1992 I was working with Durval Campos-Costa and Peter Ell on nuclear medicine projects. The ME project seemed interesting but I guess was not considered convincing enough to...

The 2 day CPET seems to show that one vigorous exercise is followed by a dip in function a day or two later. But there are situations where this occurs in normal people. After repeated exercise the effect goes away and the muscle gets more powerful.

I had not taken too much notice of the reference to the Lightning Process in the NICE scoping document. However, it does make clear just how close papers like this are to altering clinical practice. I have serious concerns about the SMILE study, greater than pretty much anything else, and I...

That's the sort of thing I mean by faulty signalling. Faulty signalling covers a huge range of things including immune responses, brain responses, autonomic responses, muscle mitochondrial responses - whatever you like. What is does not cover is structural damage or sheer lack of ATP or oxygen.

OK, so in a way this was a trick question, but in good faith. Various people, including Willy Weir and the MEA purple book interpret the deteriorated result on the second CPET as 'an objective demonstration of PEM'. I strongly suspect that van Ness and Keller tend to think something like that...