I am sorry to hear this how terrifying! How is your son doing now? I’m just astounded at the hypocrisy of claims made to be saving us from harm through commitment to evidence, at the beginning.
In the list of people awarded emeritus membership of Cochrane in 2023, a couple of familiar names: Paul Garner Hilda Bastian From the minutes of the Governing Board, August/Sept 2023 https://community.cochrane.org/orga...e/governing-board/meetings/agenda-and-minutes https://community.cochrane.org/site...23_09_01_restricted access_final draft OA.pdf
I've now found the page on the Cochrane website with all their Emeritus and Lifetime members listed and a bit about each emeritus member: https://www.cochrane.org/news/cochr...mbers:,standing commitment to Cochrane's work.
He still seems to be doing his best to follow its trajectory. He's going to need a submersible to dive deep enough soon.
Paul has made a truly extraordinary contribution to Cochrane. Indeed, more than anyone else he has blown their cover. He should be should get the Toto Medal - for revealing the Wizard for what he was.
Hilda has always maintained she is not and never will be a member of Cochrane whilst they fail to make all their content open access. She left Cochrane over this issue I believe, despite being a founder member. So she should have rejected the membership, as Rob Scholten did. I wonder why he did that. I have met RS a few times (he was the director of Cochrane Netherlands since the beginning of Cochrane, and he seemed very sensible to me. Very interested in patient involvement as far as I remember). I may have tried to get him interested in this at some point, as I did with Peter Gotzsche, who got kicked out of Cochrane, and Jos Verbeek, another person from the Netherlands, who was head of Cochrane Work (review group). I suggested Cochrane Work would be the best review group to manage a review of treatments for ME, as the ability to work or participate in education is such a key and objectively measurable outcome for people with ME. I did suggest that at some point certainly to Jos,, and maybe also to Hilda.
Sounds like Cochrane highly approves of Garner's method of evidence synthesis consisting of "my personal anecdote proves it beyond any doubt, and we should promote positive anecdotes and silence negative anecdotes about mind-brain-body-spiritual conjoinship healing, and also healing hands and neurolinguistic programming should get money shoveled at it while biomedical research that debunks it should be shut down". It's impossible that they don't know of it, if you look at his twitter feed it's been an obsession for the last 3.5 years. Most of his posts since then are about this, and his only published work in that time, the Cochrane review on the triple therapy for microclots, wasn't even needed or made sense. In fact it makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine since there hasn't even been a single clinical trial of it yet, and the entire "evidence pyramid" of EBM depends on trials to make systematic reviews. It was, in effect, a review about nothing, highly motivated by politics, ideology and personal obsession, and he used his status at Cochrane to promote it. Cochrane thinks that only promoting personal and other people's positive anecdotes of wishful thinking healing while silencing a far greater number of negative and neutral reports is good evidence synthesis, is the most Cochrane thing ever. Cochrane is to the original concept of evidence-based medicine what North Korea is to a democratic republic.
Oh, Paul likes diving! Seem to remember him going on a diving trip/ conference, one whilst 'oh so compromised post (long) covid'....
Posted on Twitter by the Cochrane Consumers account..... "The University of Alberta’s free online critical thinking and science literacy course to help people differentiate science from pseudoscience" https://www.ualberta.ca/admissions-programs/online-courses/science-literacy.html I wonder if they ensure that their review authors take it?
Copied post Cochrane UK will be closing its doors for the final time this Thursday 28th March 2024, due to the loss of NIHR funding. https://uk.cochrane.org/news/goodbye-and-thank-you-cochrane-uk-team
Good riddance! This major cut in funding for Cochrane was the reason for the big reorganisation of Cochrane over the last few years, and the main excuse we were given for work stopping on the new Exercise for ME/CFS review. I think having announced the new review process as a priority and only getting away with publishing the 2019 Larun review on the basis that it would soon be replaced, Cochrane had an obligation to continue to give it priority. Instead they abandoned it. And from Hilda's latest reply on her talk page, it still isn't regarded as a priority by Cochrane leaders. A professional organisation that is forced to downsize should stick by its current commitments first before starting up new ones. Cochrane has published lots of other reviews in the intervening 4+ years. They could have stood aside from doing any Covid reviews - it was too early for most of them to show anything useful anyway and lots of other organisations were focused on Covid.
Thursday, October 24, 2024 Cochrane announces new scientific strategy Cochrane announces new scientific strategy | Cochrane
Tuesday, October 8, 2024 Cochrane helps launch new WHO guidance on best practices for clinical trials Cochrane helps launch new WHO guidance on best practices for clinical trials | Cochrane
If blinding of an allocated trial intervention is not feasible (for example in trials of different types of patient management or surgical procedures), blinded or masked outcome assessment should be pursued for objectively determined outcomes, for example through use of a prospective randomized open-label blinded endpoint (PROBE) design (see also Section 2.1.9 ascertainment of outcomes). This suggests some confusion. If an endpoint is truly objective then there is no need to blind or mask. I have never heard of PROBE but it sounds dubious. Usually these acronyms are there to weasel through dodgy practices by making them sound respectable. Recommending GRADE isn't good. All the right words seem to be there, but the impression given is that as long as everyone follows a mindless recipe all will be fine (and you can cut a few corners if you really have to).
Discussion of this document has been moved to a new thread: Guidance for best practice for clinical trials, World Health Organisation, 2024
