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
 
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?
 
Affliliation and its address are made up.

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
Yuwan Gao
Department of Ophthalmology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanyang Medical College, Nanyang, China

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

Department of Biomedical Research Center, Medical College, Xijing University, Xi ’an 710123, Shaanxi Province, China

The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanyang Medical College, Nanyang 473061, Henan Province, China

The address I found for this hospital is slightly different from what the rapid response says, though:
Rapid response said:
No. 47, South Station Road, Wolong District, Nanyang, Henan, China
Random website said:
No 46 Chezhan South Road, Nanyang, Henan Province, China

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.
 
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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

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:
Screenshot 2025-05-19 at 20.26.16.png

These people don't exist. The papers are fake. It's all fake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_paper_mill
 
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.
 
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/
For example, the domains noted above, 126.com, 139.com, and 163.com, are not fake. They are real domains with valid Mail Exchange (MX) records that point to real mail servers for handling real email communication.

“The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online.”

Reddit comment
It's funny that 163 and 126 are blacklisted as they are two of the largest email providers in China.

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

"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
 
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