Agree. Will ask the moderators to merge this thread with the forum kitchen.It's a complete smØrgastrone.
Agree. Will ask the moderators to merge this thread with the forum kitchen.
And in a bizarre twist, the latest troll friend of the PACE gang was lauding the editorial and Stokes-Turner and Wade's vast experience at RCTs as the reason why they should be considered... I don't know, superior, I guess was his point?... and listened to no matter what...The Science Bit by professor Brian Hughes: Expert reaction to the BMJ editorial calling for the abandonment of standards
An invited, non-peer-reviewed guest editorial in the BMJ has claimed that behavioural interventions for “complex conditions” (such as ME or CFS) should not be judged using the customary criteria — and that the relevant studies should not be evaluated as though they were proper randomised controlled trials — because, among other things, “double blinding is impossible.”
I don’t think this makes sense. Not least because one of the editorial’s co-authors had previously argued that standard RCTs were, in fact, essential for this purpose.
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 subjective outcomes that is the Achilles heel.Funny and spot-on article by Brian Hughes, as usual.
I especially love the selected past quotes, incredible hypocrisy. But again reminding me of the CODES trial insisting for years that number of seizures and only number of seizures is reliable, then doing a full 180 when it fails, basically pretending they never said that, even committing to praising secondary analysis, which is explicitly forbidden.Funny and spot-on article by Brian Hughes, as usual.
I do love this bit ...The Science Bit by professor Brian Hughes: Expert reaction to the BMJ editorial calling for the abandonment of standards
An invited, non-peer-reviewed guest editorial in the BMJ has claimed that behavioural interventions for “complex conditions” (such as ME or CFS) should not be judged using the customary criteria — and that the relevant studies should not be evaluated as though they were proper randomised controlled trials — because, among other things, “double blinding is impossible.”
I don’t think this makes sense. Not least because one of the editorial’s co-authors had previously argued that standard RCTs were, in fact, essential for this purpose.
Brian Hughes said:And of course it would be truly absurd to argue — on the pages of the BMJ, no less — that all these terrible studies would look a hell of a lot better if we would only just ignore their flaws.
https://www.virology.ws/2020/12/21/...-bmj-from-prof-hughes-prof-racaniello-and-me/I have sent the following letter to Fiona Godlee, editorial director of BMJ and editor-in-chief of The BMJ, on behalf of Professors Brian Hughes and Vincent Racaniello as well as me. We were responding to the recent editorial regarding the new draft of ME/CFS clinical guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence–as others have already done through BMJ’s rapid response function.
I would regard the ‘small number of service users’ as a downright misrepresentation. Hopefully later on today I will be up to counting the number of respondents involved in the various surveys.
Also published on Brian Hughes' blog The Science Bit - Letter to the BMJTrial By Error: A Letter to BMJ From Prof Hughes, Prof Racaniello and Me
https://www.virology.ws/2020/12/21/...-bmj-from-prof-hughes-prof-racaniello-and-me/
This makes me curious about the recent rewrite of the Cochrane guidelines, in which they marked some very low quality ones as being of high quality. Doesn't Cochrane use GRADE? How did they rate the same studies so differently using the same tools? Given that some of those studies could not possibly be more biased yet were rated as having low risk of bias, it probably came down to who was doing the grading, then who signed off on an obviously fantastic interpretation of the rules.The thing that really gets me is that NICE has been using the GRADE system since 2009. If as they argue it unfairly downgrades the evidence base of rehabilitative treatments then why did they not raise the issue earlier before over a decades worth of NICE reviews were produced using 'poor' methods?
Doesn't Cochrane use GRADE? How did they rate the same studies so differently using the same tools?