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It interests me that these presentations are in June 2015. White and Crawley will already have been aware by then that the criticism of their work was spreading beyond those with a direct interest to the wider academic world. White's piece contrasts sharply with his presentation in Bristol in...

The advice against testing for pathogens and immune abnormalities has nothing to do with BPS people or 'mental health care'. The infectious disease physicians have found no infections and the immunologists have found no abnormalities. The advice comes from physicians in the relevant specialities.

That I entirely understand and you might even say that is the whole point of the forum until something actually turns up. But doctors get a lot of stick for falsely claiming that treatment works. It seems to me there should be a level playing field. Nobody should be claiming ineffective...

My reading is that somebody in the system is admitting failure. That may not change anything but someone has broken ranks. I also think that specifically naming Bob is relevant.

I think we know that - about 7 billion! (Not counting vulcans and clingons)

The problem is that individualised medicine can only kick in after you have a result on a whole population - a standard controlled trial. Once you know there are some people who truly benefit you can start finding out how to 'individualise' them. But you can never get reliable evidence of...

None of those are known to help ME/CFS as far as I know. 'Leading ME/CFS doctors' does not necessarily equate to doctors who know what they are doing. I can think of some leading politicians...

Yes, but out of how many people who received the advert? Presumably people with other conditions are more likely to look at health sites so the proportion of 69/1400 probably means nothing at all. We have no idea whether this is 69 PWME in 15,000 or 15,000,000 do we?

I have not read the paper beyond the abstract but is there any sign of a denominator here? What was the size of population from which this group of 69 people were drawn? Unless we know that I cannot see how anything can be said about prevalence. I also think that self-reporting in response to...

I have only looked at this blog and video briefly. The woman in the video looks to be having a grand mal epileptic fit. I am not sure how that ties in to the story in the blog, although apparently she has been diagnosed as having epilepsy. I am not clear what message the video is intended to...

Had you not read this, David? (@dave30th ) I had not. The whole bunch of presentations is interesting as context.

In a sense 'created in the lab' is exactly right. It seems that a stray mouse retrovirus got into lab cell cultures and underwent a change in its DNA to become a new variant that infected cells in ME and prostate cancer studies. The change in DNA may have been trivial and irrelevant but it...

This is exactly right. Trials need controls with identical belief commitment in both therapist and patient. I have pondered this before thirty years ago for physiotherapy. The problem is that a sham is always a sham. The role playing shifts. What may be needed is to compare two or more 'real'...

It is interesting the way that abusive emails and FOI requests are run together as if they had any similarity. Abusive emails are harassment. FOI requests are unlikely to be in the context. It seems very unlikely that the same people (as part of an organised campaign) were responsible for both...

Maybe it has changed its name but I must have read several thousand immunology papers over the years and never come across it. I doubt it is as many as you think. A lot of people on the forum are well aware that nothing has any useful effect on ME as far as we know. Lots of us are attached to...

I will still be in France next week. I do not see a great point in asking Dr Chalder questions. I prefer to arrive at answers myself on the basis of evidence.

One of the things that I have been doing as part of due diligence to provide context for evaluation of evidence in trials of therapist-delivered treatments in ME/CFS is to look at other papers coming from the same authors. One always has to question whether an evaluation of a piece of science...

Thanks. It isn't clear that NICE actually changed anything on the wheelchair one but I have not gone back and re-read the final version.

I was taking that into account. The people I did not mention are quite varied in their views I understand. I have confidence that a good number of people on the committee will judge fairly. It is also worth remembering that those with a personal interest in a therapy are supposed to sit out...

As I said, the outcome is not certain.