I did a talk for OMEGA (Oxfordshire ME Group for Action) on 29 October which is now on YouTube. It's a story of how I came to be involved in criticizing Cochrane over ME research. There's a lot of detail about the behind the scenes manipulation to allow publication of the amended Excercise review in 2019.
A version for those preferring to read is here
And the Tweet is here
Thank you Caroline. It's becoming increasingly clear that the entire EBM paradigm needs to end, it's nothing but politics behind the scenes and marketing in public.
Taking the incident with the fraudulent papers that, when taken out, don't really change the outcome and how it doesn't bother anyone. Similar to how NICE found that most trials were too awful to use, then IQWIG going even further, but nothing that once you take out the very bad trials and only keep the bad trials, they pretty much say the same things. And it doesn't bother anyone!
Seriously, though, no other profession would ever use such flimsy evidence. No professionals use bad evidence knowingly. About anything. It's one thing to have a bad form of evidence and make it better over time, but the opposite is happening as the paradigm is reaching the limits of how much BS it can put out. The standards keep getting lowered and lowered, as if bundling a bunch of disparate therapies for random uses together in one supercategeory, the equivalent of having a generic review on "medication", was not enough of a tell.
At this point I don't really care anymore about this review. The time has long passed and it's become a sick joke. The process started in 2016 and we still have complete radio silence. This is simply insulting. Long Covid massively increased the importance and urgency, and this organization dedicated to clinical evidence is entirely oblivious to it. Absurd. The detachment from reality is too extreme, there is simply no connection between what these people are doing and what is needed.
Frankly, I think we should move on from criticizing ME-specific research, none of the BPS research has much to do with us anyway, and take on the entire paradigm. It has clearly failed, it's just that with thousands of jobs dependent on it and billions wasted in escalating commitment, the industry itself will not move. There is job security with no real work involved. Too easy a scam to let go.
The very idea of making life and death decisions about millions of people based on bad evidence is absurd, wrong in itself. This is what's at. EBM is the lowest form of evidence of any profession, consistently pointing out how the lousiest standards are needed for this pseudoscience to go on is a hard position but it has the truth. This is clearly much bigger than us, and Garner's and other's increasingly irrational behavior can only be explained by the challenge they face. This has to end. Let's end this error.
