Tuller / Trial By Error: The Crawley Chronicles, Resumed

I think principle is only ever a noun.

 

@Barry- I beg your pardon. You are right. Said my brain was fried!

 

I've noticed MEA seem to have not been promoting Tuller's recent work on social media in the way they used to. That seems worrying.

 

The A level issue would likely affect both arms of the trial to a similar extent. They could also have reported sensitivity analyses where the data was looked in different ways e.g. excluding those doing A levels.

 

I agree. I do believe it is time for CS to let go of his 'in the tent' argument but unfortunately, there is no sign of this. David Tuller's blogs have shone a light on what the BPSers are and have been doing which is nothing that benefits people with ME.

 

Charles Shepherd said to me yesterday that he has being having a bit of a rest from social media with the other place debacle. However, he is now aware of the move to S4ME and I suspect will surface again in a while.

 

This all makes you wonder why this wasn't all accounted for in the study design, its bizarre. Why didn't they design the study to measure like for like. Instead they chose to change the protocol half way through using bizarre reasoning like, we cant measure objective attendance because people have to attend for different amounts of time.

Surely that still confuses things in the self reports of attendance also?

 

the other problem with using teenagers might be that their bodies are going through so much change anyway, that self reporting on how tired they feel is going to be even less accurate. Therefore this would imply that there is even more of a need for proper scientific/biological results to illustrate any improvements.

 

It's not like she's operating in a vacuum. Where is the oversight when designing and funding a study like this?
More people are complicit in this fiasco.

 

I think it's all in the spelling. She's still 'practising' with a 's'

 

Completely agree ..it's bizarre. Cognitively dissonant.

 

It might be a pity that she is not, operating in a vacuum

If she was, operating in a vacuum, then it would be more difficult for her noises to influence people, or her studies.

I leave the choice of which meaning of "vacuum" to others to figure out. For all I care she could be operating in a vacuum, which is itself, in a vacuum, although one with a plug socket

 

Holy cow, @Peter Trewhitt 's comment over there eviscerates the logic-loop that the trial is. Totally brilliant.

 

I have had problems with comments on the Virology Blog being deleted as spam, and David suggested breaking this one up, so here it is as a single comment that hopefully is easier to read than in the three parts that appear there:

 

OMG - you live and learn.

 

Pondering this earlier today, I begin to wonder if this necessarily is all premeditated, as I've tended to think. Maybe a major factor really is just sheer lack of professional competence. Maybe they just don't have a clue how to run clinical trials. It's as if they just slept through those aspects of their education, or thought it didn't matter. How can else can they so blatantly fly in the face of established scientific wisdom?

 

I think it's really easy for patients to underestimate how much incompetence and laziness there is in medical research. It's so important to us to get to the truth... but for some researchers, this is just a job.