Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Occupational Status: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study, 2021, Chalder et al

not directly related to this paper; I've seen TCs coi declarations noted on various papers.
Not seen mention of her participation on psychwire.
I don't know much about this organisation but presumably she gets paid for her consultations
see
https://www.s4me.info/threads/podca...addox-trudie-chalder.12394/page-2#post-338377

 

Thank you @Brian Hughes and @dave30th

And a first comment on the reply to the reply:

Brian Hughes, The Science Bit:

https://thesciencebit.net/2022/05/24/authors-defend-statistical-errors-editor-sees-no-evil/

 

Bothsideism, presenting conflicting accounts and material facts of a story without even attempting to determine which claims are true, is a plague in journalism and it's sad to see that the problem has reached medical publishing.

Now there's starting to be a serious problem with the hierarchy of truths. One of the reasons why medical expertise can be used in a court setting is because science has a higher burden of truth than a judicial trial. Not all truths can be established in a court of law, so judgments are made based on the available evidence and reasonable doubt.

A testimony from a medical expert has significant weight in a court setting because the scientific process is supposed to be far more stringent than basically any other process in society. However it's now clear that it isn't.

We can take for example the many medical experts, including some of our BPS overlords, who have financially benefitted from doing just that: giving their expert advice over the concept of "functional somatic" something or another, based on the idea that as experts, they have credibility and would not make baseless claims, their testimony can be discarded but it is considered reliable. Those testimonies were used to deny private insurance coverage and disability benefits but also to remove them later on, through re-assessments.

Those testimonies are clearly not reliable, not based on evidence and not even based on legitimate expertise. Except they are on the exact same level as any other medical testimony, rely on the same overall processes of certification and scientific research. All because science is supposed to operate on a level where although it does not guarantee perfection, it at least guarantees the absence of false claims, a premise that is clearly false because of psychosomatic ideology, and many other examples in history.

How can medical evidence truly be considered reliable in itself in a court setting when we see that the process is clearly no better than basic journalism in some places? And of all places, exactly on the main issues where the testimony of a single medical expert can be used as evidence in itself? As we saw basically with the allegations of threats and how a UK tribunal scolded the PACE researchers for making wild accusations, they operate at a lower level of reliability than a tribunal.

Forensic science has had a lot of hits and misses, procedures that were used in court that were later found to be largely unreliable. This has lead to changes, to downgrading some forensic evidence. Most of the stuff on shows like CSI is junk. But here we see the very same issues with medical expertise, that it is, in fact, not reliable, especially so on the issues where medical evidence has more weight.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? Other watchers, of course.