ME/CFS NICE Guideline - Safety testing of GET in PACE trial

A long, but very enlightening read on the subject of healthcare learning from the aviation industry's approach to improving safety:

https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/05/how-mistakes-can-save-lives

 

That's a good article. Very reassuring to realise I'm not the only one to recognise the parallels of aviation safety and medical safety. Why shouldn't the medical profession be prepared to learn relevant safety aspects from the aviation industry?

 

The software industry is notorious for having poor quality control, all because of costs.

The medical industry is on the opposite end, promoting safety first, sometimes even leading to loss of life because of delays.

The promotion of this psychosocial paradigm by medical professionals make the software industry safety standards look downright godly by comparison. Hundreds of thousands of complaints, explicit rejection of consent, consistent reporting of harm by independent analyses and still any possible harm is simply denied and those raising the alarm are vilified as delusional activists.

Giving all the weight and credibility of medicine to an ideological framework that is exempted from any of its rules and obligations is a predictably terrible idea. We told them so decades ago, and constantly since then. No excuses here. People who accept the awards have already accepted the full blame for the millions of lives destroyed.

 

@Barry I have no safety engineering background, but I am an engineer first, and a physiologist second. Like you, I've followed the 737 Max debacle pretty closely, and my favorite insight from that reading is this. The big philosophical difference between Boeing and Airbus is that Boeing has long built airplanes "for pilots to fly." Airbus has aimed to build planes that anyone can fly. The predictable result is that Airbus has built market share especially in places where the supply of expert pilots is short. To answer this business threat, Boeing undertook its first effort at building a plane that anyone can fly and MCAS was the key piece of that effort. That it was a good business decision was proven when they attracted so many orders - orders that Airbus lost. But there was a terrible human cost.

So without attempting to lay blame in an area where I have only interest, but not expertise, I think Boeing, despite its eminence, was a beginner in this part of aircraft design. And they made a beginner's mistake. As @Barry says, a single sensor is unforgivable when lives are at stake. Even two seems too few to me.

So the parallel to NICE and GET appears to me to be that GET was put in place by eminent amateurs, has had a terrible human cost, and must be removed from all policy documents as efficiently as possible. Because there is no regulatory body comparable to our National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) or FAA, this has become and will remain a political issue with a political decision. To some, this means it's time for diplomacy. To others this means it's time to call people names and to fight. I'm old enough to think we need both, and any wise advocacy organization should deploy both.