Germany's "National Decade Against Post-Infectious Diseases"

[PageofME]

I see it the other way: it leaves the door open. But I only see it this way because it literally always happens like this. It should be banned entirely from this program, for the same reasons why faith healing and any other form of pseudoscience would be, on grounds of validity and quality of proposals alone.

I have zero doubt that plenty of resources will be wasted on psychosomatic nonsense, because it's always disguised, and this language easily allows it. Plus there is all the pressure that will happen in secret, behind closed doors, which is where 99% of decisions are made.

The emphasis on clinical trials is also problematic. Clinical trials are not viable without a plausible mechanism to address a known pathophysiology, and we don't have that yet. Given everything that's happened with the debacle of LC research, it's very clear that money spent on clinical trials is entirely wasted at this stage. This is especially problematic because trials take years to slowly cruise from one end of the pool and back. They are one of the least effective and efficient processes known to humanity, and almost never work out, even when we know what to target. Which we don't.

If someone has a plausible mechanism for a drug that might work, it would be far more efficient to do basic research to validate this mechanism, rather than trying anything that might affect it. It's faster and cheaper, while actually serving the purpose.

This is not encouraging at all.

There are the acyclovir responders like me and there's herpes abortive lytic reactivation theory and acyclovir has a very good activity against EBV early phase "mise-en-place" work of virus replication.

I feel not taken seriously with these ideas on this forum since months because half of the forum is obsessed with fighting PBW nonsense like you and the other half with the hypes around the drug study of Fluge and the genetics and machine learning project at Edinburgh.

I agree with you at least on the emotional plane. Yes, it's very frustrating.

 

[rvallee]

There is no reason to ban a field explicitly if the quality assessment by the grant panels is good enough because bad research won’t get through it then. And they’d still find ways to get the research framed as biological, e.g. by doing some basic bloodwork alongside the CBT or whatever.

This is the reason to ban it, because it always slips through with overt misrepresentation, which everyone involves is aware of, and it only works because those making the decisions want it to pass through with overt misrepresentation, they think it's fine to do it this way.

We saw how it went in Norway, with language that banned it, and most of the money was grabbed by psychosomatic ideologues anyway. It's not just that it has to be banned, it should be an over-the-top ban that explicitly guards against dishonest attempts at misrepresenting the research objectives, because this happens a lot. It's like that one thieving client at a bar that keeps disguising themselves so the bar has to post photos of the person with their multiple disguises, explicitly reminding how devious they are and to look out for anyone resembling them.

When people have a history of malfeasance, the rules guarding against them have to be very explicit about how they operate, and especially the ways by which they game the system. I know it won't happen, but this is what's needed to produce good outcomes. We never see good outcomes, because overt misrepresentation is the norm on issues like this.