Last Monday, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) held its much anticipated roundtable discussion event, ostensibly to appease those (few) medical stakeholders who had baulked at the newly developed treatment guideline for ME/CFS. Regular readers will be aware that NICE developed its guideline over several years […]
Year: 2021
[Class Recording] Is Psychology a Science?
We are under attack! Well, at least at my university we are. A cyber attack that is. As a result, all our IT systems are down and there is widespread disruption. Coming in the middle of a pandemic (yes, I said “middle”), it is certainly creating quite a lot of […]
BMJ chooses face-saving over fact-checking
So last week, our friends at the BMJ published yet another ‘news’ item in one of the esteemed journal’s very-much-not-peer-reviewed sections. It carried a rather dramatic headline: Covid-19: Boys are more at risk of myocarditis after vaccination than of hospital admission for covid In a world swirling with anti-vaccination conspiracy […]
NICEXIT: Royal Colleges look to “take back control” of treatment standards
The very fact they call themselves “Royal Colleges” should have been a sign. Simply put, some of these folks have a rather high opinion of themselves. There seems to be a widespread view within Britain’s “Royal Colleges” that they form a kind of medical aristocracy, a ruling class with feudal […]
The new NICE Guideline for ME/CFS: Ten Questions Answered
[UPDATED: 29 October 2021] 1. What’s going on? 2. How is the new guideline different to the old one? 3. Why is the new guideline being welcomed? 4. Why was the old guideline problematic? 5. How did NICE arrive at the new guideline? 6. Was NICE overly harsh in using […]
Journalists covering ME/CFS: Don’t ask about the new NICE guideline, ask about the old one
To fully understand the future, it is important to know the past. Next week, we finally get to see that long awaited new NICE treatment guideline for ME/CFS. As regular readers will know, all indications so far suggest the new guideline will be dramatically different from the old one. Graded […]