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I am sorry about that but this is basic probability theory applied to sets. I have been through all the relevant arguments. I may not have expressed them well but as far as I am aware they are what they are. Because they all have CF and if you found a property of the CF set then the highest...

I agree, but I strongly suspect that the difficulty in meeting standards is almost entirely a reflection of the fact that the treatments don't work. If psychotherapy really worked there would also be a replicable dose response effect. It might be that benefit rose sharply going from 3 to 4 to 5...

Yes, we hear that all the time, but it is a contradiction. You only need rules if you don't understand how to work out if something is reliable yourself. If you don't you won't know when the rules are not appropriate to a situation in the way they might seem. You can only achieve the best answer...

Sure, but if people don't have common sense there is no point in trying to replace it with rules created by eminent people. The rules will always be misinterpreted and distorted, even if they were any good to start with. rule like GRADE and RoB2 are hopelessly flawed. So there isn't an awful...

But the reason the data cannot be trusted is a mater of human nature - expectation bias. For robots or Vulcans like Mr Spock from Star Trek you wouldn't need blinded trials. Statisticians tend to miss that point!

The South African guy is not Santhouse. I have not come cross him before.

No, if the methodology is OK the studies will be right. They may not tell you what you want to know but they will be right on their own terms. You cannot force other people to use the diagnostic criteria you prefer. They are always an arbitrary choice based on personal opinion, even if the...

I see it as a desire to appear as an 'Outraged Medical Intellectual'. As to what the outrage is about that may not matter much.

I don't think the current government have any more of a clue as to the machinations of medical politics than the Flowerpot Men.

There is no justification for using rules based on what other people think. Someone assessing reliability has to know why things are reliable themselves. It isn't difficult. It is almost entirely common sense. But rules can only ever be an approximation to what some other people think and in...

It is simply because they are biased and dumb, let's face it.

Yes, but, as my old boss used to say, even a policeman could work out that 'it's difficult' is no argument and that objective results are the solution. At that stage it is simply a question of assuming that young doctors have basic common sense.

Of course they are. They are appointed because they are reliable non-boat-rockers. Every time.

The choice of criteria is relevant but if criteria are wider than the set of interest they are still valid for that set unless there is evidence to the contrary. In the end the analysis is a statistical one of what is the most likely predicted probability of result in a study applying to...

Worth remembering that statisticians tend not to understand anything about blinding of trials. Blinding is there to solve a problem with human nature entering with measurements. Statisticians are often not that good on human nature. Medical students get steeped in it from their first clinical year!

It is taught in clinical pharmacology courses, if I remember rightly at the preclinical stage of basic sciences. When I was taught it we used Desmond Laurence's textbook (Desmond was at UCL). It is part of the basic explanation of why we do double-blind trials. Every medical student has heard of...

I think in all these discussions we need to be open to the possibility that a diagnosis ME/CFS is applicable to two or more very different sorts of illness - that just tick the same boxes.

It was White and Knoop and in the same paper they said that CBT worked through the placebo response!

It may be worth reminding people that when I presented my thoughts about the PACE trial to the University College London Division of Medicine (cardiologists, endocrinologists, haematologists, clinical pharmacologists etc.) nearly ten years ago now the audience unanimously agreed that PACE was a...

But that would mean that the 'wider' population was in fact the narrower population in that regard.