Academic publication is increasingly a performance art. So how effective is its quality control? – AN ESSAY – The sheer stampede of COVID-19 research has drawn mainstream attention to the issue of quality control in scientific publishing. Even long-established major journals seem more inclined than ever to carry content of […]
Other Bits
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 […]
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 […]
On risk perception and vaccine clots
I am a bit late posting this, but there you go. Watchyagonnadoaboutit. The other week I was quoted in the Irish Times on the matter of risk perception and vaccines: Proper risk assessments should combine two factors: impact and probability. In other words: “how bad something is” and “how likely […]
Our response to that controversial study on CBT outcomes in chronic fatigue has now been formally published
As you read here in February, David Tuller and I attempted to respond to an alarming research paper that appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The paper they had published had purported to show evidence that cognitive behavioural therapy leads to symptom improvements in […]
Some psychiatrists still not getting it
Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern University, has written a powerful piece over at Social Science Space, responding to the awful Op-Ed on Long COVID that appeared the other week in the Wall Street Journal. He doesn’t hold back: It would be mistaken to suppose that disdain for patients […]