Dr Gabrielle Murphy - UK BPS ME/CFS doctor

Thanks @Jonathan Edwards, I thought as much but as a layman it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff! or from the 'complete bullshit'

 

job advert:
Department:Chronic Fatigue
Location:Royal Free Hospital, London
Salary:£49,077 - £56,632 pa inclusive

https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/showvac/1/2/915439623

 

Do people giving each other awards really qualifies as "award-winning"?

I give you an award. You give me an award. You get award. You get an award. Everybody gets an award. We're all award-winning!

There are many commercial organisations that do similar stuff. Basically fake "business bureaus" that give the illusion of being official but in fact it's all just a marketing thing and people pay to get their award for something like #1 business of their kind in some area.

Most papers in this area of "research" seem to be reviewed only by like-minded members of the mutual admiration society. They give each other awards and commendations, mentor each other and never, ever, criticize another's work.

All done in the old ways of doing science, with confident rhetoric and the skin-deep illusion of seriousness, cherry-picking and outcome-seeking. Every research is ground-breaking, even if it's literally identical to dozens of similar work that has all the same flaws and assumptions.

And it will all end up in the same filing cabinet as phrenology. All of this for nothing. Millions of lives destroyed for an ideological circlejerk.

 

Continuing on that thought, I don't remember a single piece of serious internal criticism in this area of research. It's all flawless, all a thing of beauty. No one says anything bad about their colleagues' work, it's all useful and beneficial and groundbreaking. Even glaring flaws are OK and never remove anything from the outstanding brilliance of the work.

As far as I can tell this is the exact opposite of how scientists behave. Scientists become very possessive of their own ideas and will find 100 flaws in other people's work before they find something they like. One particular reason is that almost all the research published in this specialty is identical to one another, or close to. It's all slight variations of the same theme. Everyone is playing the same chords in the same key and time signature, the instruments are tuned identically.

So while I don't have personal experience of how intensely scientists typically criticize each others' ideas, it's just too similar to programming and a popular trope in films and television where one programmer glances at a screen of code and just marvels at how brilliant it is. This has never, ever, happened unironically in the entire history of programming. No one has ever looked at someone else's code and bestowed it any more praise than calling it, yes, a piece of garbage, but a functional piece of garbage. Most programmers will call their own code from a few weeks back a piece of flatulent garbage 100:1 over praising it as anything more than modestly functional.

So this is extremely revealing about the inherent flaws in this whole area of research: the self-correcting process of science has been turned off. This has happened many times in the past, many of those within the areas of psychosomatic medicine, always with the same predictable outcome.

 

All must have prizes! As this was the expressed view of the Dodo let us hope they too are on the point of extinction.

 

It looks like this person is stepping down creating the opening:

https://www.royalfree.nhs.uk/services/staff-a-z/jaclyn-cook/

Seems to me she may be on to something.

 

Sadly, I think it may be driven by employers who no longer use common sense and judgment and just go over a list of how many things the person has done to 'prove' they are worthy of a job.

 

I wondered that too. Apparently you can call yourself a Chartered Scientist if you register with the Science Council: https://sciencecouncil.org/scientis...hich-professional-award-is-right-for-me/csci/

 

I have appropriately adapted my signature to reflect this commendation, which I accept with pride and... pizza.

 

"Jaclyn is an exercise physiologist with a special interest in chronic fatigue and pain."
Says it all really. ( my bold)

 

And oh, the fulsome praise on this page.

 

@Sly Saint A certain "JB" stepped down as vice chair. Mike Beadsworth was at the meeting and took an active part in it.

 

Jessica Bavinton I presume.
eta: https://www.s4me.info/posts/128030/

 

The name I have noted as new BACME chair is Libuse Ratcliffe. I am not sure where I found this info, nor anything about her...

 

possibly here?
https://www.s4me.info/threads/cmrc-...has-joined-cmrc-representing-forward-me.5205/


eta:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Libuse_Ratcliffe

eta2:
https://www.actionforme.org.uk/uploads/images/2018/12/cmrc-board-minutes-nov-2018_2.pdf

 

I do have this experience and it is brutal. It starts when you share your ideas and data informally with your colleagues who then proceed to pull it all apart in fine detail until what you thought was a good result now seems like a pile of rubbish. You then do more work (for perhaps months or years) to prove that your results were real and go through the process again, possibly several times, and in more formal settings - seminars, conferences etc - until you finally have something worth submitting to a journal. Then there is a formal peer review, which is another level of scrutiny and criticism. Finally it is published and it is either ignored or rubbished by other scientists.

A lot of medical research is not scientific.

 

I have now done a transcript of this talk. (see here:Dr Gabrielle Murphy - UK BPS ME/CFS doctor)


I picked up on a number of things:
1) the 3 charities who requested/organised the talk were AfME AYME and the Sussex ME Society.
(Hence references to Sonia, Mary-Jane and Colin).
2) as @NelliePledge says in the op, this is along similar lines to Pariante, in fact at the end of the talk she briefly mentions the interferon alpha study, and the Brain Pain one.
3) according to GM psychoneuroimmunology, takes the 'best from the BPS' model; so inspite of all the impressive sounding blurb about science, the BPS model still underpins their approach.
4) as per usual 'it's all about fatigue'......not even necessarily the chronic variety. And she thinks we should just call it Post Viral fatigue and be done with it.

It never ceases to amaze me how these so-called UK ME/CFS 'experts' (who have been seeing patients on a regular basis for some time) really don't seem to have any real understanding of the illness.