Patients with severe ME/CFS need hope and expert multidisciplinary care, 2025, Miller et al

I just think it looks like an ad. They cite Nerli and Reme, so I don’t think they have a clue about what they are talking about.

 

Nope. Definitely some sort of AI / paper mill. Just writing comments/letters on a load of disparate subjects in a load of different journals, all from the past few weeks.

There are two other comments from the past 11 days in the BMJ alone.

https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r822/rr
https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r875/rr

Always the same co-authors. Affliliation and its address are made up.

The email they've supplied for comments in other journals is cookies_white@outlook.com

 

Ah, that makes it look worse..

Out of curiosity, what tipped you off?

 

Referencing only studies in the original piece is the big giveaway.
Chinese affiliation and address — the BMJ is UK focused, as is this article.
The overall structure and the structure of the arguments are very AI.

 

At least one of the three names (Yuwan Gao) and a name from another rapid response you linked (Yulang Fei) seem to be the names of real people that work at the named hospital.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2254887424000638

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsomega.4c03137

The address I found for this hospital is slightly different from what the rapid response says, though:

But apparently the Chinese word "chezhan" means "station". So just the number is off by one.

Edit: I'll try sending these people an email (if I can find their email addresses) asking if they wrote this response. It doesn't seem related to the papers they normally write.

Edit 2: I couldn't find an email address for Yulang Fei, but I sent emails to Xi Qu and Yuwan Gao.

 

It's all just made up. I don't think people realise there are hundreds of thousands of papers published that are totally made up.

This is from the supplementary material for second paper you linked:


These people don't exist. The papers are fake. It's all fake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_paper_mill

 

Good luck!

 

If you look up this 'ere website 163.com, you don't need to be able to read the language to work out it's not a hospital or a university or a journal. It looks like a Chinese version of Take A Break magazine, with the ad feed from Autotrader.

 

It's apparently a common email provider in China:

https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog...ric-and-fake-looking-chinese-email-addresses/

Reddit comment

Edit: But yes, I'm not sure if it's weird for a researcher in China to not have a university or hospital email address.

 

I'm pretty sure it would be weird. Surely they'll have the same professional standards as people in other countries, where corresponding authors don't tend to invite responses to gingerjonno@hotmail.com

 

Yeah 163 is part of NetEase which is huge in China. Good to see the article you linked talk about the history and homonyms, there’s very interesting creative and entertaining uses of language on the internet in China. This was linked to the dialling code needed to get online.

For a while in the early days of computing and the internet it was also difficult to use non ascii (non basic latin characters) on many computers let alone the internet and domain names. Not ideal if your language is based on different characters. Things have changed, unicode is used more widely which allows more scripts but also opens up some problems. But sometimes numbers were easier and domains often not taken by big US companies.

I’m sure I’ve seen gmail accounts as authors or responses. As we all know not everyone posting useful information is tied to an academic institution. I get that this looks scammy, but it’s worth remembering sometimes things just look odd because they’re different or unknown.

 

After our detour into AI-bots and paper mills, there is a new rapid response from MEAction UK: https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r977/rr-5

 

It’s good to see a clear stance! They went a vit beyond the evidence with the findings, but that doesn’t affect the arguments against the BPS babble.

 

Another good rr. This time from @Joan Crawford: https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r977/rr-11

 

Good rr from a now medically retired former NHS consultant in rehabilitation: https://www.bmj.com/content/389/bmj.r977/rr-12

 

Great response!

She clearly didn’t do it correctly then!
- Some Gurner fella, I don’t know..

I’m glad she called them out on «finding their own path». Ironically, what they mean by that is «follow our path, and only our path». Orwell might have a thing or two to say about that..

 

Bravo @Joan Crawford that final sentence was quite the flourish

 

"Hope for patients with severe ME would be better inspired by appropriate funding allocated to research and treatment. Patients should not have to ‘find their path’ [2] any more than a patient with lupus or multiple sclerosis, but rather be offered expert medical management and safe MDT interventions appropriate for the severity of their illness."

Perfect!

This is something we need to repeat everywhere