BMJ Management of post-acute Covid-19 in primary care, 2020, Greenhalgh et al

Two more Rapid Reponses

One of interest (first two paragraphs) from Diane O'Leary

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3026/rapid-responses
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Discussion of this Rapid Response has moved here:
Diagnosis of ME and the use of the labels ME and CFS.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1298993074765361158

 

Ah, yes, Fiona Godlee is definitely on the case. A very relevant person to speak about this. Totally.

 

Really excellent. Thank-You Trish for your efforts.

Is it me or am I sensing a thaw at the BMJ with regard to taking on information that accurately reflects the troubling situation we find ourselves in courtesy of the pysch 'experts?'

 

@Trish, thank you for the hard work and energy that went into this. The final draft reads really well.

Let’s hope sufficient numbers of the right people read it and take it seriously.

 

Well done, Trish! Excellent letter. I'll be sticking it out on Twitter shortly.

At one point, BMJ Rapid Responses had a voting button, so you could "Like" a letter - appears that BMJ have stopped doing that unless it does not display for me in Opera, or it only shows when you are logged in to BMJ, which I'm not at the moment.

Anyway, great to see your letter up there.

 

Are you aware Trish, that a small selection of BMJ Rapid Responses are chosen for publication in the BMJ print edition? The print edition versions are indexed in PubMed. (I had an RR selected for the print edition in 2003.) This appeared about three weeks after the article to which it referred had been published in print. If yours were selected, you should expect to be contacted by the editors by email to discuss and agree any edits, confirm your address and email address. Would be great if yours were selected for the print edition.

 

Some words to that but I doubt Godlee understands how they are directly linked to the whole Crawley/BPS affair she has utterly failed at handling. "Honouring the patient experience" is exactly what Godlee and her journal has helped to effectively block and disparage. Some patients are more equal than others, or something to that effect...

Oh, is that a bad thing? Yes, yes it is. So why is Dr Godlee a strong proponent of doing exactly just that on some patients, not on others?

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3392

 

@Trish its brilliant that it got published there, well done, i hope it makes it into the print edition

 

Now I wonder who might have convinced them to think like that...
https://twitter.com/user/status/1305799865461616641


Link in tweet is to the subject of this thread.

 

How shocking that the ... *checks notes* ... current standard of care is being applied to ... *checks notes* ... sick people.

I mean, yeah, it is, because that current standard is shockingly bad and harmful. But I have little patience for Greenhalgh's blatant hypocrisy here, it's very annoying. This is a house she agreed to build, and then defended. We warned it was rotten all the way down and leaking toxic spills everywhere.

And now, what, she wants exemptions? The whole system that guaranteed failure should remain in place but we'll do an exception for this one situation that falls perfectly under the criteria? Hell no. What a completely broken mess of a system.

You say you don't like your monster's work, Dr Frankenstein? But it is what you ordered it to do. Maybe the problem isn't the monster itself.

 

Sorry don't know how to embed a tweet. The above is a response from T Greenhalgh.

It still seems a rather insensitive and clueless comment. It gives me the impression that few people outside those affected with illness really pay close attention to what it's all about yet think they know. Too busy no doubt.

 

From the BMJ article:

That paragraph on evidence on treatments for chronic fatigue seems not too bad to me at a first glance.

OK, the authors could have added something about the difference betwee chronic fatigue and ME/CFS and they could have said that there is not only much debate and controversy but that Cochrane finally acknowledged much of the criticism and as a result there has been much controversy between the Cochrane editor in chief and the authors that worked on the revision of the review. And that the latter controversy nearly let to a withdrawal instead of the publication of the updated version.

And that as a consequence to the still poor quality of the updated version, the new editor in chief set up a patient advisory group for a completely new update process.

Or at least, the authors of the BMJ article could have actually referenced the patients' and others' responses and the announcement of the editor in chief instead of the old review from 2017 via Pubmed [= endnote 47].

Of course, the reference to the old review might just be a typo.

Edited for clarity.