By David Tuller, DrPH
In October, I spent 10 days traveling around Ireland and giving a talk called “Bad Science, Bad Medicine: How Flawed Biopsychosocial Studies on ME, Long Covid, etc Harm Patients.” (I wrote about the trip here.) I came as a guest of the Irish ME/CFS Association, which had previously arranged similar tours with two physicians who are ME/CFS experts–Dr William Weir, an infectious disease specialist, and Dr Nigel Speight, a pediatrician.
I started in Dublin and then traveled to Bray, Cork, Limerick, Galway, and Sligo. The Irish ME/CFS Association has now posted a video of the first talk, in Dublin. (I think the talk got a bit smoother as I went along. Oh, well!)
An excellent talk flagging up many problems with the biopsychosocial research in the ME/CFS and MUS/PPS/FND fields using the examples of the PACE Trial for ME/CFS, the REGAIN Study for Long Covid and the CODES Trial for dissociative seizures (a subset of FND).
I’ve a suggestion if David gives a similar talk in future, and that’s to add an extra entry to the list of problematic research/reporting strategies – when abstracts and “what the study adds” sections do not adequately summarize or reflect what the study found or what’s explained in the small print of the text. I don’t think that’s covered in the list he gave but it appears to be a frequent problem that reflects really poor work on the part of peer reviewers and journal editors. NB David gave a good example of this problem – the REGAIN study which has been corrected, I suspect at least in part due to his diligence and letter-writing. How many doctors read past the abstract and have time to pick through the small print? Many will wrongly believe that the claim/s backed up by the reference are sound and if they check out the abstract will not be set straight. This really needs to be high up on that list, I think. Also, it might be helpful to summarize the talk by picking out which research or reporting problems applied to the examples given by showing that list again with the relevant studies/trials added to each entry, just to ram the points home.
Yes, some form of that should be added to the list.
I appreciate that it’s already quite a long list!