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Well, there's a very easy way to get the views of 800 people with ME and that is to sign up to S4ME. I cannot see why they should not do that in preference to a two hour meeting that will get bogged down with wittering. They could have a dedicated thread open for months.

I am still sceptical @Woolie. When I was talking of thoughts I was thinking of what one might call 'mindsets' that will be hanging around in the brain throughout the proceedings, in the way that priming stimuli do. These may set circuits to spread more widely when tasks are difficult, not...

An interesting question. The problem at the moment is that a grant giving body cannot really insist on publication because journals might turn all papers down. At present publishing is a long difficult process because you have to second guess the foibles of the referees. That system needs to be...

I don't follow that, @Woolie, what are the experimental and control trials? Surely if the experimental trial is asking someone to do a difficult task that will raise different thoughts for people with ME than healthy people just because they know they are being challenged in relation to...

All the costs and more are already covered by R & D department audit procedures. Every piece of research at UCL has to be logged in advance and a report has to be produced at the end. Documents can be automatically uploaded onto something like ORCID or IRIS (local database). People already...

The difficulty for me with this sort of study is that we would expect patients to have different thoughts from controls while taking part in a test like this. The regions with increased blood flow may simply reflect the different emotional connotations for patients and controls. For a control it...

Yes, I am not sure how this works but I think PubMed traditionally has attempted to list everything in what it considers a reasonable list of 'respectable' journals. I think it also includes some stuff from other sources but I don't think it makes any attempt to search for independent documents...

Papers are just online with URL addresses based on the university of origin. At present we go to PubMed and it tells us there is a paper and whether the URL is feely accessed or through subscription. In an open system all Universities will have URLs for papers freely accessible. Nothing could be...

If the pain is real it cannot be psychogenic because it wasn't 'thought up by the mind'. It might be brainogenic or hypothalamusogeneic but what it cannot be is psychogenic. The psyche is the thinking me. The unconscious is not another 'mind' hiding out of sight. It is just the brain doing what...

I presume this is a way of Nature publishers doing damage limitation - so that they can still make money with 'read and publish'. The truth is that they are redundant. It's like turkeys voting for Christmas to be in January. The end is nigh.

Absolutely right. Of all the many hundreds of people I saw in the clinic with pain not more than a score or so had pain that was inexplicable. And one of those turned out to be lung cancer. One person in three has chronic pain because their discs are squashed down or their cartilage is worn out...

Bring not to see me cease to live A doctor full of phrase and fame To shake his sapient head And give the ill he cannot cure a name. (Matthew Arnold).

No, there are no guidelines for what opinion to give. There are often guidelines for what issues to address - is the methodology good, was ethical approval obtained, are the statistics OK, etc etc. but for most journals it is assumed that reviewers know what to cover. But the only real...

Peer review costs nothing. It has always been done free of charge and should continue to be. The only costs of journals used to be the printing and distribution. Editors did it out of love for the subject or the satisfaction of the job. I am an unpaid editor. I love it.

This is actually a really interesting study of unexplained cognitive deficits in medical researchers. It admirably demonstrates that if you want to see just how severe their cognitive deficits are get them to get a visiting Portuguese student to write a review article for an obscure offshoot of...

@arewenearlythereyet, I take the point about being worried about who is prescribing ECT. However, my own experience was reassuring. In order for ECT to be prescribed an independent physician specifically assigned the job of assessing the right indications has to be called in. In my wife's case...

No, I think the formal information stems from much more recently. I suspect 80's/90's although I don't know the papers first hand.

I don't think it is necessarily a matter of hindsight. My understanding is that the rules have been skewed by lay pressure. My wife's psychiatrist knew that ECT was likely to be the best option long before things got bad enough for it to be allowed. If she had had it three months earlier sh.e...

There is no comparison. Everyone who has ECT in the U.K. Has to have it approved by an independent physician and formally recorded. Based on this long term studies have been done. The fact that there is an established optimum dose means that there are reliable measurements of benefit that are...

Bone marrow ablation with stem cell transplant is a blunt tool but it saves thousands of children's lives. Do we need more than that? Lots of treatments would be better refined but it isn't always practical. I think ECT is quite sensible scientifically. Psychotic illness is likely due to brain...