Anomalies in the review process and interpretation of the evidence in the NICE guideline for (CFS & ME), 2023, White et al

Did anyone save the ME Association statement? It was here:
https://meassociation.org.uk/a107
It has been removed from the website and nothing seems to have replaced it (looking at the news section).

Did it contain anything more than the (in my opinion, useful) comments from Dr Shepherd that appeared in some media articles?
Dr Charles Shepherd, medical adviser for the ME Association, said: “It is disappointing but not surprising to find that these doctors and researchers, many of whom have devoted a large part of their professional life to trying to persuade their colleagues that ME/CFS is caused by abnormal illness beliefs and behaviours and can be successfully treated by CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) are still refusing to accept the recommendations in the 2021 Nice guideline on ME/CFS.

“The Nice Guideline Committee (of which I was a member) spent an enormous amount of time over three years reviewing all the evidence on CBT and GET from both clinical trials and from people with ME/CFS.

“It concluded that the clinical trial evidence for the use of CBT and GET was of very poor quality and that people with ME/CFS consistently reported that CBT was ineffective and that GET made their condition worse.

“We are, therefore, pleased to see that Nice is robustly defending the recommendations regarding CBT and the removal of GET in the new guideline and the way in which these conclusions were reached.

“The guideline’s recommendations have been widely welcomed by the ME/CFS patient community, and by most healthcare professionals who are actively involved in supporting people with ME/CFS in both primary and secondary care here in the UK and overseas.”
From:
https://www.irishnews.com/news/ukne...in_chronic_fatigue_syndrome_guidance-3426398/

 
That's what I meant. The UK newspaper reading public are reading the same dross about ME they read 10/20/30 years ago, more or less. Journalists still calling it Chronic Fatigue/Syndrome, still misrepresenting the patients, our views, our reasons for criticising exercise as treatment, BPS researchers hogging the headlines .... what's changed? Nothing much.
oh haha! LOL duh :emoji_face_palm: i was thinking you meant that things had been better recently or something.

When you said the following, i focussed on the bit i've emboldened - like 'back to' meant we hadnt been there for a while

So we are back to ME being called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome all over the national press.
lol I see how you meant it now, I'm with you and i agree completely :)
 
From the ME Association Facebook page:
ME Association

King's College Hospital website reports on the paper criticising the new NICE guideline on ME/CFS.

Not surprisingly, as several of the main authors of this paper work at KCH, this unbalanced article focusses on their criticism of the NICE guideline and fails to refer to the statement that NICE has issued today in support of the guideline, or any statement from one of the ME/CFS charities.

Several of the health professionals who co-authored this paper are (or have been) involved in a service at KCH that manages people with ME/CFS.

So it would be helpful if they could clarify whether their position on CBT and GET influences the way in which people with ME/CFS are managed at KCH and whether the service adheres to the new recommendations from NICE relating to CBT and GET.

Dr Charles Shepherd
Hon Medical Adviser MEA
Has anyone seen any other statements from ME/CFS charities?
 
On the Guardian article specifically I just went to the home page and I had to do some scrolling it wasn’t highlighted near the top of the health headlines I had to click a link for more and it was down the bottom. For the general public this will not really register. It is there more for those who adhere to NICE 2007 to point fellow NHS colleagues to. But the fact remains that the guidelines are in place and they are what NHS commissioners should be taking account of not Guardian articles.
 
On the Guardian article specifically I just went to the home page and I had to do some scrolling it wasn’t highlighted near the top of the health headlines I had to click a link for more and it was down the bottom. For the general public this will not really register. It is there more for those who adhere to NICE 2007 to point fellow NHS colleagues to. But the fact remains that the guidelines are in place and they are what NHS commissioners should be taking account of not Guardian articles.
Anyone know whether it was in the printed paper? It went up on the website at 1am which is maybe around the time articles in the print edition might go up?
 
Earlier this year, I saw a similar article in an esteemed neurology publication aimed at health professionals. The written piece basically reinforces the idea that CFS is not neurological.

Unfortunately, I didn't save it otherwise I would have shared the link. It now seems like the Guardian article is just part of a lengthy and widespread attack on the new guideline.
 
Dr Charles Shepherd, medical adviser for the ME Association, said: “It is disappointing but not surprising to find that these doctors and researchers, many of whom have devoted a large part of their professional life to trying to persuade their colleagues that ME/CFS is caused by abnormal illness beliefs and behaviours and can be successfully treated by CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) are still refusing to accept the recommendations in the 2021 Nice guideline on ME/CFS.

It isn't just NICE. It is several major top-level medical science institutes around the world who have made it clear in recent years that ME is not a psycho-behavioural disorder, and hence a major reorientation of research priorities and clinical practice is urgently required.

NICE is arguably the most important, given the UK is the epicentre of the disaster. But the fact that all these bodies are coming out with the same basic conclusion needs to be repeatedly pointed out. The 2021 NICE guidelines is not a lone rogue effort.

What this latest and drearily predictable farce really shows is just how captured by the BPS cult the mainstream media in the UK have become over this issue.
 
I can imagine this article causing distress, but the thing that stuck out to me was NICE seemed pissed in their response. It's 50 or so idiots screaming in the wind to me. Yeah they got their shitty piece published in a number of outlets, but how many people are actually reading it?

Responding to it might in fact amplify their idiocy. Seen it happening with politicians and other. Might be better off spending our time lobbying institutions to implement what they should implement instead of giving these fools the light of day.
 
Did they ever actually publish the 'pre-bunked' article the same lot pre-published on '8 errors of' which turned out to be their own errors in blagging they were and weren't just things they wished were true?

Because if not I can't help but think this is their weak, eventual attempt at doing what they thought they were going to do with that - that after the pre-bunking they then sat on their hands with and finally decided they were best just doing their usual avoid any detail whatsoever (which will/can be pre- or de- bunk) and just list their names and stomp their feet a lot with blaggy manifesto

I guess their one aim of it being the hope that saying Nice don't know what they were doing (saying it again) will somehow change the world and the facts. Oh and they must have thought it has been too long since they last repeated their advertising mantra of 'saying it 7 times for it to stick' of 'what a shame our only thing we can do professionally now isn't offered, patients will really miss out'.

The sad/ironic [for a bunch of people in 'malingerer ideology studies' directed normally by malingerers at people who aren't malingerers] thing is that if it were any other idle malingerer then anyone would say 'that's your fault for not only insisting on being a one-trick pony in something useless/harmful, but stubbornly choosing to avoid all possible learning or wanting to adapt what you do'. But I guess the pointing and chanting 'whoever smelt it dealt it' card can work for a really long time for some.

then whinging that your outdated 'treatment' and ideology based on 1960s manifesto-level non-science can't continue to gravy-train, money for old rope, name your phrase... even when it harms according to surveys and never had any basis according to the science. Cant' people just walk away satisfied with the spoils they shouldn't have made in the first place?
 
Dr Charles Shepherd, medical adviser for the ME Association, said: “It is disappointing but not surprising to find that these doctors and researchers, many of whom have devoted a large part of their professional life to trying to persuade their colleagues that ME/CFS is caused by abnormal illness beliefs and behaviours and can be successfully treated by CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) are still refusing to accept the recommendations in the 2021 Nice guideline on ME/CFS.

It isn't just NICE. It is several major top-level medical science institutes around the world who have made it clear in recent years that ME is not a psycho-behavioural disorder, and hence a major reorientation of research priorities and clinical practice is urgently required.

NICE is arguably the most important, given the UK is the epicentre of the disaster. But the fact that all these bodies are coming out with the same basic conclusion needs to be repeatedly pointed out. The 2021 NICE guidelines is not a lone rogue effort.

What this latest and drearily predictable farce really shows is just how captured by the BPS cult the mainstream media in the UK have become over this issue.

The reporter publishing this isn't even in the health portion of the Guardian, is she? Might've just been looking for a quick article to publish to meet some sort of bullshit quota. A couple of posts upward @NelliePledge already commented she had trouble finding it.
 
Yes, I kept seeing the word ‘study’ and thinking what have I missed. The paper is if anything an activist manifesto, rather than a reasoned scientific critique.

A Trumpian tactic that predates Trump the politician, to accuse those that disagree with them for doing exactly what they have done themselves.
I saw a few articles with the same, and I can't escape the obvious fact that the commentary was paywalled so that lazy journalists and editors won't bother reading it and see that it is not, in fact, a study and simply copy what's on the press release. I don't even know how it would make sense to make a "study" of NICE's process that happened nearly 2 years before it was written anyway.

I think it's categorized as a review in the journal and even then, it would basically constitute a self-review since it is their own work that was reviewed as very low to low quality. There must be another word for this because obviously one cannot "review" a review of your own work, this is like writing a newspaper article about yourself.

And obviously they do those things because it works. Lazy journalism has been critical to the growth of lazy pseudo-research. Just like the Guardian using "chronic fatigue" every single time, being asked to correct it every single time, is also obviously no mistake. They published more than enough stories to know this. And still they do it every single time.
 
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It may not be such a coup. For a large majority of the UK population I suspect anything loved by the touchy, feely, lefty, just love that therapy, Guardian, is immediately viewed as a joke. The average Telegraph reader is unlikely to be impressed by Chalder's claim that NICE has denied all these lazy tired people treatment they desperately need. The ironies whirl like a Tibetan prayer wheel.

Indeed. Partcularly if someone listed how much of her time (paid for by her tenure) and how much funding or payment either directly or indirectly she has had for each of her 'studies/papers' and what they consisted of: repetition of the same thing over what decades ........that Nice basically has outed as a body of work of no scientific worth to be included due to serious issues and flaws.

That's what this is really about of course. Imagine if someone spent decades doing the same study about how you could motivate a car into going faster by giving it a talking to, just iterating the same thing over and over with few differences between studies that were each funded etc. and someone said none of it is usable due to very low quality. And that was the same for the entire crew who built and owned the kingdom for the entire area. You'd think that would be the story and the headlines wouldn't be 'hard done by pretend scientists, iterating their protests [in the same way they iterated their research for decades]'.
 
The problem is that the people in groups 2) and even in 3) who skim-read the article won’t be checking Garner’s position for logical fallacies, or thinking seriously about any of the issues involved. They will just see another clash of experts and think “looks like the jury is still out on whether yuppie flu is real”.

The great success in dealing with both climate change and holocaust denial came when media platforms refused to entertain the concept of “legitimate debate”. We need a GNM moratorium on BPS relitigation of PACE and on conflation of ME/CFS with chronic fatigue - and if Viner proves to be uninterested, someone should appeal to the Scott Trust. Because ultimately, GMG is responsible only to the ghost of its founder, and its founding myth is that it behaves ethically.

I'm interpreting that what you mean is that they are going for this actually being a 'political article' for those 'in the game'. I think you have a point there. It is like the misogynist classic when a woman is being picked on and a bystander should call it but instead chooses to label it as 'two women not getting on/falling out etc' like that's just women leave em to it and 'don't ge involved'. The complication here being that this lot want the default left, which requires people in all of those sectors following their orders and suggestions towards patients.

But glad that Nice is mentioned and did also comment, which is a big move forward from x years ago.

And actually with the maternity scandals coming out and what is beginning to be said e.g. by those investigating there to highlight tendencies to ignore, and other scandals I do think that pwme suddenly somehow managing to actually get a voice to make it clear that this lot 'speak against our interests' vs Nice (as if it wasn't clear from their continual derogatory rumour-mongering about us in most of their articles) is starting to be relevant - just to make it not just theoretical and about science and regulator vs a few outdated 'mavericks' who have and intend to continue carrying on regardless etc.

Not that that would happen in the GUardian I imagine.. but elsewhere is possible one day?
 
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