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 […]
Some examples of comedy are jarringly impactful precisely because they feel so authentic. A personal favourite of mine is the 1984 movie This is Spinal Tap, the legendary mockumentary depicting a fictional English rock band attempting to rescue their dwindling reputations by organising one last big-splash concert tour. It is […]
The pandemic of Long COVID psychobabble continues. This week saw yet another terrible study claiming that long-haul COVID is just an illusion of human cognition, an illness-like experience rooted in psychological processes. The widely reported “finding” was published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine by a group of French […]
Whether to laugh or to cry, truly that is the question. Professors of psychology can be a strange breed. While some are blind to their own faults, others are are obsessively self-critical. Perhaps this is why the field of psychology has been described as being “in crisis” since (at least) […]
Having spent years casting their critics as angry anti-science activists, some of our favourite panjandrums have now entered Phase 3 in their own year-long campaign of (a) getting angry, (b) engaging in activism, and, yes, (c) throwing science-based medicine under the bus. Here is what the Royal College of Physicians […]
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 […]
