Science

‘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 […]

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 […]

selective focus photography of magazines

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 […]

Paradigm Lost: Lessons for Long COVID

David Tuller (University of California, Berkeley), Steven Lubet (Northwestern University), and I have written an opinion piece over at Health Affairs. It’s on the implications of recent developments in ME and chronic fatigue syndrome for the treatment of Long COVID. We argue that the paradigm shift signalled by the UK’s […]

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Time to flatten the curve of shoddy COVID scholarship

Last October, I wrote that COVID-19 had created a stampede of shoddy research. Little has changed in the interim. Putting all hands to the pump might feel appropriate in a crisis, but during a global public health emergency, rushing headlong into the scholarly frontline is anything but okay. Frankly, it is […]