Just the other week, I spoke at the annual conference of the RME, the Swedish National Association for ME. In my lecture, I took another look at the new ME/CFS guideline as published by NICE about one year ago. While I covered ground that might be familiar to some, it […]
ME/CFS
Medical haste, COVID-19, and the mythology of “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”
Here is an extract from a lecture I gave last year for my colleagues at the Psychiatric Association of Turkey. It concerns the issue of so-called “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”: I attempt to show how the primacy effect — a reliance on first impressions — serves to distort medical reasoning. For […]
‘Cancel culture’ paranoia and other right-wing hysterics reveal medical conservatism’s true colours
Historian David Olusoga has been speaking about the ironies of ‘cancel culture’: Olusoga, whose work has explored black Britishness and the legacy of empire and slavery, said that people “feel perfectly comfortable making these comments about me without being able to point to a single reference or footnote in my […]
Authors defend statistical errors, editor sees no evil
Let’s have another go, shall we? Last December we wrote about a paper published in Occupational Medicine, in which the following information was presented in a table: The study concerned a group of patients who were scrutinised at two time-points, firstly at “baseline”, and secondly at “follow-up”. That is basically […]
The New NICE Guideline for ME/CFS (2021): Following the Science
Just last week I gave a presentation to the Norgewegian ME Association on how the new treatment guideline for ME/CFS is rooted in scientific evidence and reasoning. The video has now been posted: By way of a teaser, here is the title and background info for the talk: The New […]
Will innumeracy cause this study to be retracted? Don’t count on it…
I used to be concerned about bad science. These days, what gets me going is wrong science: blatant error somehow surviving peer-review and ending up published as if it were fact. It seems that is where we have got to with modern academic publishing. Standards have slipped so badly, even […]