link for 'chronic fatigue syndrome' goes to the NICE guidelines.......unfortunately 2007 page...but at least now it says in a large banner on the page "Guidance This guideline has been updated and replaced by NICE guideline NG206. " https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20221122/docs-make-their-own-long-covid-protocols the article goes on to say:
Sound guidelines are badly needed, but the they will be mostly symptom management unless we continue increasing funding for treatment trials. They also need to consider the heterogeneity of Covid-19 sequelae. Someone whose muscles wasted away from 3 weeks in a coma will benefit from exercise but someone with PEM won't.
It sure is true that they are widely available and have been used. They are essentially useless, but it sure is true that they have been used. All this stuff most patients can do easily. It's everything else they can't. Stop wasting professional resources on amateur stuff that nearly everyone manages on their own. This is not what any of this is about. But linking to the deprecated guidelines cannot be excused as an oversight, it was deliberate. Absurd. Genuinely 1984 level of ignoring the record.
Why are the 2007 NHS guidelines even available to link to? Shouldn't these be deleted? What's the time limit on retaining incorrect, harmful guidance?
So NICE kept the url for the old 2007 CFS/ME guidelines but now it just acts as a landing page with no content just a redirect to the live 2021 ME/CFS guidelines. which means any links in papers referencing the old guidelines take people to the new. So anyone persisting in referring to the old is wasting their time. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG53 A win for the new guidelines
Ah, well, at the very least there is no confusing the fact that those guidelines have been deprecated, the message makes up the whole page. That's good. Which says either of two things: no one checked, or no one cares. The person who wrote this could not have possibly been mistaken about the page being only a message that says it's deprecated, so clearly they don't care. Frankly both options are the same. Healthcare would benefit so massively from software development practices. We solved all of those issues already, this is frankly silly, linking to a deprecated version of something should throw an automated error. What a waste of good practices just because the bubble is an echo chamber.
Well NICE could have just put in a straight redirect to the new guidelines. But it’s good at least for a while that people are told the old ones are defunct. In my old job we wouldn’t have still had people going through the landing page 12 months later. but as we’ve seen this new guideline is probably only just beginning to dawn on people within the system so making it clear the old one is defunct is probably still needed.