Effects of therapeutic interventions on long COVID: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, 2025, Chang Tan et al

Didn't feel like going deeper into the evidence because the included populations were so diverse and dissimilar to ME/CFS.

Also got the impression that the reviewers didn't care much about quality of evidence. Only briefly scanned the studies but of the 25 included I don't think there's one trial that is robust and sound.
Clearly neither does The Lancet or its reviewers.

Which is the bigger problem. Publish this junk in some random blog, where it belongs, and it doesn't matter. In fact there are dozens of those already, and they're all over the place. Even though most of them only include a small fraction of them, since they're so awful. Because the entire premise of medical research is that eminence overrules evidence. It doesn't matter what the evidence actually says, it matters who says it, who believes it, who promotes it. The evidence itself, the outcomes, pretty much don't matter at all.

And the low-quality fraudulent pseudoscience is so popular that even prominent sources keep promoting it. It's all completely abstract to them. It's not about people and how they are affected, everything they do is detached from reality. And the more "inside the house" they are, like with Glasziou, the more they defend the worst of it. Because it's the bulk of it, as very little they do actually works. A profession where the worst promoting the worst seems the best way to get promoted. Hard not to see this as a main reason why this so-called evidence-based medicine delivers almost nothing of value.
 
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