Characteristics of patients with motor functional neurological disorder in a large UK mental health service (2019) O'Connell, Wessely et al

@Andy can you please check the link? It’s not working for me.

 

The link worked for me but it was for David's previous post, not the one I was quoting. I've now put the correct one in my post.

 

@dave30th

Characteristics of patients with motor functional neurological disorder in a large UK mental health service: a case–control study – CORRIGENDUM

"This article was published in Psychological Medicine with an error in the following sentence:

‘Bermingham et al. (2010) reported that the incremental cost incurred by somatising patients is £3 billion per year, accounting for 10% of total NHS expenditure.’

Should read:

‘Bermingham et al. (2010) reported that the incremental cost incurred by somatising patients is £3 billion per year, accounting for 10% of NHS expenditure in the working-age English population in 2008–2009.’

The authors apologise for this error."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...-corrigendum/AA9A968EA25109F61F8B10D6BF7C141B

 

Bet that hurt.

 

A quick web search shows total NHS expenditure around £160 billion, so the inference that £3 billion was 10% of total expenditure was massively misleading. God knows how many flawed financing decisions have been made on the back of that.

What matters now is for that correction to be seen by all who need to, and not just swept out of sight somewhere.

 

Nice! Another journal should be publishing a similar correction soon, also with Professor David as senior author.

 

I assume they will never make that mistake again.

I'm just kidding of course they will do it again because it's fully deliberate and they don't have to care about anything but themselves.

 

Doesn't this episode show what is wrong with the "scientific" literature? Repeated mistakes of this nature would not occur if people were going back and reading the original source. It is easy to read the huge lists of citations which some people offer and imagine they are familiar with the papers in question. In many cases not even the abstracts will have been perused.

Perhaps we need a new convention that a paper should not be quoted unless it has been read in its entirety.

 

Yes, it does show a mega-omission from the scientific process, or so it seems to me - learning from past mistakes not being the responsibility of individual scientists, but some better way. Maybe some global register that has to be updated as part of the process, and referred to as part of the process when considering new studies. But I appreciate that is one of those things that is easy to say, but likely very difficult to do even if the will really was there.