Oxford psychiatrist Michael Sharpe doesn’t seem to be able to stop himself from sending silly letters to publishers about something they have published that he doesn’t like. Earlier this year, I reported on
his efforts to have two excellent stories retracted–one each by my friends and colleagues Julie Rehmeyer and Steven Lubet. (Disclosure: I have co-written articles with both of them.) Professor Sharpe’s letters were somewhat incoherent. They included untrue accusations and represented—to me—his inability to break free from the vicious cycle of self-serving argumentation in which he appears to have been trapped for decades. Sad.
Earlier this month,
Annals of Internal Medicine published
an editorial by Peter Rowe, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins, about the null findings from the Norwegian rituximab study. In this editorial, Professor Rowe had the temerity to cite
last year’s PACE reanalysis (Wilshire et al, of which I was a co-author) and suggest that the investigators’ own reported findings in
The Lancet and elsewhere had essentially been debunked.
Professor Sharpe, of course, was not one to let this pass. In his published response, he accused Professor Rowe of drawing “a nihilistic conclusion about treatment options” and wrote this:...