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Wellcome is really linked to the SMC, Farrar is matey with the usual sorts (Wessely, etc). Hard to know much about Farrar's personal views. Here he was linking to the Times article on Sharpe being forced out of.... hold on, isn't Sharpe one of the co-authors of the new piece challenging NICE?

Jeremy Farrar moving from Wellcome to become science chief at the WHO: https://wellcome.org/news/wellcome-director-dr-jeremy-farrar-step-down-february-2023

This was in the COI section of the Lancet commentary on NICE's ME/CFS guidelines - there was a discussion of this at the time:

Weren't Wessley, PACE etc involved in some PR media push over a past Christmas? I guess it's a time where there are predictably less news stories around and journalists can be grateful for stories they can have pre-prepared. It can also make it more difficult for people to respond in a timely...

I was expecting them to have drawn in people like Guyatt. But it seems likely that there are going to be multiple prongs to this.

Oh right, so this looks to be just part of a co-ordinated response with the IPD reviews:

Author list actually looks less imposing than I expected: I suspect that there will be a lot of people outside of this list promoting it though. Thanks to the journalist for this info.

Hmmm. I feel a bit worried about that assumption.

To varying degrees - they've toned down a lot of their more over-confident statements about their work. I think that they realised they were hurting themselves and changed approach. Recent pro-BPS articles are often pretty vague on what they're claiming for the benefits of BPS approaches. We...

I really disagree. I don't know enough about FND or the ways it could be treated to make a really informed comment, but I think that dismissing things like this based on assumptions rather than a serious engagement with the evidence will only make people look bad. There have been examples of...

It's done as part of an appealing narrative. And it can feel sophisticated to people who don't know much about it. That seems to be what people like! I do feel as if a natural disadvantage we have is that the pro-PACE simple narrative can get away with a vague pseudo-sophistication. The...

Archive link that avoids giving them clicks: https://archive.vn/L471V Looks like more persuasive propaganda than some people might want to give it credit for. Like a lot of these articles, it seems to avoid saying much of substance, going more for creating an impression. Maybe we should learn...

'Control' seems closer to the truth than what Sean was replying to though: For a topic few journalists have detailed knowledge of, an organisation able to place a couple of strong propaganda pieces and brief a load of other journalists is certainly able to have an important impact on the...

Absolutely. I worry that some patients underestimate the extent to which communication like this shapes the way medicine works.

Thanks. I get the impression this is quite an influential site - I keep meaning to follow them more than I do.

Do we? Do we have any evidence he even read the old Cochrane review? From what I've seen, it seems he can make some quite bold claims more on the basis of his instinctive thinking than anything more substantive. I'm not sure that's terribly unusual for academics. I would be far from confident...

I'd agree that their are aspects of LP that could be viewed as harmful in and of themselves. That does reflect a particular value system though. My impression is that many of those in EBM prefer to overlook that sort of understanding of 'harm', so we often need to do some work to explain and get...

No worries - I should have been more clear.

I'm suggesting that this slur will seem similar to you to how accusations of 'brainwashing' will seem to those who think that the LP has been/may be helpful. I'm certainly not defending it!

When making claims of brainwashing, whose testimonies are to be trusted? edited to clarify that the following is intended as an example of how this sort of accusation can be turned back on members of S4ME, hopefully to illustrate how we would not be impressed by this sort of argument: "Of...