Review Interventions for the management of long covid post-covid condition: living systematic review, 2024, Zeraatkar, Flottorp, Garner, Busse+

I wonder if the fact that they called it a "living" systematic review is exactly because they have insufficient crumbs to use for the interventions they want to promote (CBT & exercise). So that when the inevitable criticism comes that bringing in 1 study for each main conclusion is not a "systematic review" they'll go: "Well, duh, it's living, it will be updated with additional publications."

Which would still make no sense for an organisation for which creating "living" systematic reviews can be appropriate (like Cochrane), and would be utterly ridiculous for what is just a journal publication.

(Handy if that's allowed if you want to produce smoke & mirror reference fodder for the promotion of your preferred intervention though.)


Edited to add: sorry if this has already been mentioned - I'm following this thread a bit, but haven't read it all.

 

The review got referred to in a big newspaper in Norway the other day. It's about a rehabilitation clinic for LC with a GET/CBT approach (AiR). The article is paywalled, but here are a few auto translated quotes:


– What have they done to you?

– A lot of it is about the mental side, but also that I was ready to accept the information and knowledge they gave me at AiR. I asked myself: Do I want life to continue to be about dwelling on Covid, or do I want to do something about it? I had to make that choice myself. I like to use a metaphor: You can lead a horse to water, but it actually has to drink itself.

...
Psychologist Lars Gregorius Røv holds classes with the participants.

– I try to help people get out of a rut. Many are depressed, you don't really like being out of work and social life. We talk about focusing on all areas of life, not just the difficult ones, says Røv.

...
Physiotherapists Sara Chopra and Hugo Øren help participants at AiR's outpatient clinic get started with physical activity.

– Many people struggle with post-viral fatigue – they feel tired. What is special is that many of those who come here have actually not been very sick. They may have had a mild course of the disease, and yet they struggle with late effects. Often, these are people who are actually well accustomed to exercising, says Chopra.

...
Another recent study published in the British Medical Journal at the end of November concludes that cognitive behavioral therapy and a combination of physical and mental rehabilitation are probably the most effective for late effects after COVID, but the effect is moderate.

The authors of the article have analyzed data from 24 different controlled studies that included a total of 3,695 participants.

 

It would make some sense, but as I copied from the description of what a living systematic review is, it's for issues that are rapidly changing and for which evidence will rapidly change, on the order of weeks or even days. Think early months of COVID, when they were trying lots of treatments and losing a lot of patients.

So it doesn't apply at all to this. But of course there is one set of rules for general medicine, and there is the set of fuck-you-that's-why for psychobehavioral woowoo. So of course they can use that excuse, and it will be allowed, but it's not meant for this at all. They are simply lying and cheating because they are allowed to by the very institutions that are supposed to not allow this. Because enforcement isn't even 99.9% of a system of rules, it's 100%.