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Someone I know who had Ritux (not for ME) was given an anti histamine first but she had adverse reactions to other things so it wasn't necessarily routine. I wonder if the adverse reactions were just related to the additional exertion of getting to a clinic and having treatment. If a patient is...

They do own the room because they control the message going to journalists. But we shouldn't forget the way the situation has changed. The data has been released. Patients have pulled together analyses which show they are misleading people and published them in academic literature. Cochrane have...

That does read as they adjusted the thresholds to meet their needs. And we should remember that the Wilshire definition was their definition before they saw the data.

Given they were kids at the time of being ill then this could effect their education and hence employability so we may expect lower figures than the control group for the remit group if people had recovered. (although scatter plots for the groups would have been nice).

I was seeing the issues of estimating prevalence from GPs data in terms of errors made by GPs, Clinics referred to that will pick up errors and clinics that won't pick up errors (say no doctors). It may be that GPs with clinics to refer to will be less careful as they have back up but they may...

I assume one of the big issues is with how non-specialists apply what is in NICE or other guidelines. There is evidence that non-specialist diagnosis is poor in that there are a couple of papers that indicate around 50% of those send to specialist clinics get other diagnoses. My concern with...

I think concepts of proof are not taught at school level maths any more. I remember being talked the notion of proof in geometry but also learning things like inductive proof mechanisms. But I think the issues are wider than that and probably never taught as they are ones around questioning the...

I was thinking that as I was typing.

Yes that's probably why they don't do it that way. These days I get very worried about the lack of analytical skills exhibited by people and it make me think we are not teaching people how to assess evidence and think about problems, ask the right questions of experts and assess proposed solutions.

I do wonder if the process is somewhat broken in that it may be better to have a committee of people able to assess evidence rather than being knowledgeable about the subject and then have experts giving opinions. Instead of mixing experts into the judgement process so that they can choose their...

We should remember that their excuse for changing the recovery criteria is so that they better replicated existing results.

He did come across as an academic trying to avoid criticism. He also complained about attempts to retract papers even though that was what he was doing recently. I do think part of this debate is about academics trying to assert their rights to not be criticized outside of a small closed circle...

But she could have pushed more! Like saying you hid data!

Sharpe was just on the BBC. The interviewer did push back a tiny little bit mentioning the JHP issue. Interestingly Sharpe dismisses all form of criticism beyond peer review and replication as activism and says there is no place science for campaigning (which he included everything but peer...

It has always surprised me as well. I wonder what the motivation for the journalists writing these article is. It seems strange that they would write such stories in an unquestioning and biased way - Kelland seems to have spent time on her article so its not just a rushed thing. It does make me...

I'm not sure if they planned it but it is the correct handling of having the multiple things they were testing for. I suspect they hadn't understood or thought through the implications when they wrote the protocol.

I'm not sure that a difference of medians would be valid for the CFQ. I do think there is a huge statistical naivety around the use of the mean and SD with the sf36 as I see no way that the scores would be equidistant on a definition of physical function. I do think this is an important issue...

We should remember that the definition used by Wilshire is their definition as they published in the protocol. To claim they prefer theirs definition because it fits their expectations does suggest they manipulated the definition until they got the desired result.

I think they have used this before. The way I read it is they believe ME starts with an infection and then patients get deconditioned or afraid to recover so psychological factors lead to the continuation of the disease.

Its not a case of quoting research rather we should be looking at the quality of the data by assessing the recording and reporting systems. Its also not clear to me what is measured is it by a per visit basis? So when someone I knew visited 10 GPs whilst suffering from aplasitic anemia and was...