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So now I'm still confused. https://www.nice.org.uk/glossary?letter=r Is this saying that a comparison group and control group are different names for the same thing? And in which case that an alternative intervention or no intervention can count as viable controls? Similarly here...

Ah - now I get it. Randomised Circle-jerk Trials.

Interesting, then, that the 2011 PACE paper only claimed "(PACE): a randomised trial", and not a controlled trial, having backed off from their original protocol claim. So Wade was saying that PACE did not cut it as being "reliable evidence on safety and effectiveness" - he was right.

I still think that if there is no binding definition of what a Controlled trial actually is, then it is open season for the snake oil brigade to claim their bullshit offerings to be evidenced by RCTs. Pretty much any charlatan can point to some dubiously-claimed "RCT" that is in fact nothing of...

This feels very important to me, because quacks all over the place are pushing their remedies, supposedly backed up by RCTs, when in fact the trials in question are far from "controlled". They enthusiastically cite RCTs as the "gold standard" of medical trials, which has a bitter irony to it...

Yes, when I said "listing all sources of biases that trials are known to be prone to", I really should have said "listing all types of biases that trials are known to be prone to". My thought was not to try and kill off any useful trial by getting over-bureaucratic, because I'm very well aware...

I know much of this is old hat, but just wanted to revisit, with a particular thought in mind. Possibly in the wrong thread, in which case mods please feel free to relocate. As best I understand this, though others here far better qualified: Surely a "controlled" trial is where you control so...

Presumably there would been all manner of unhelpful traits (couldn't resist that :) ) which ancestors to Homo sapiens will have had.

Excellent! :)

OK, sorry for being pedantic. It's just that in the past I've been caught out occasionally. Hopefully they will provide an acknowledgement before the Christmas closure. Many thanks.

I do love this bit ...

Huge sincere thanks to the team for putting this together. Superb.

Have we received an acknowledgement of its receipt?

I think @Brian Hughes blog maybe should have also made the point, as made by @Jonathan Edwards at times, that where blinding truly is impossible, then reliability is still safeguarded provided robust objective primary outcomes are employed. It is the combination of lack of blinding with...

So Wade states it is not possible, then immediately follows up with examples illustrating it is. Just because he may not know at the time which it is, does not therefore mean they must both be in the same category. It's as if he is saying: If you don't have the data available to tell if...

Maybe more to do with who was on the Covid guideline committee?

Interestingly, although I appreciate this is not the Covid 19 guideline itself, this document, "Management of the long-term effects of COVID-19, Targeted peer consultation on draft scope" has 27 references to "CFS" in it, and 21 to "ME/CFS"...

Read somewhere that Stokes is on the committee for the Covid 19 guideline - is that correct? If so then she would be heavily involved in rapid development of post-viral fatigue guideline that would share a strong overlap with the ME/CFS guideline - making public assertions about either would...

This seems quite sneaky. The BMJ very carefully qualifies that they judge there to be no disqualifying financial ties. And they carefully point out that where to find their policy on financial interests. But that is highly misleading (deliberately so I suspect), because their policy linked to is...

If this were true then clinical trials would often be unnecessary, and we could just take the word of those in clinical practice. Probably akin to how things were done hundreds of years ago. There must be all manner of biases that can creep in at the level of clinical practice. e.g. Assuming...