PLOS ONE pulls highly cited mindfulness paper over undeclared ties, other concerns

https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04...ss-paper-over-undeclared-ties-other-concerns/

Chalk another one up for James Coyne. I'm in two minds about Professor Coyne: his abrasive approach is quite often detrimental, in my view, especially for a patient community that is already seen as militant/abusive. That said, you cannot overlook his successes...

 

Why can't Cochrane do like this?

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1118127274128236544

 

Would creating a company with the intent of promoting a treatment model be a financial conflict of interest? Advising medical insurers to reject disability claims based on one's own research? Abusing a position of influence in a charity for personal benefit in promoting a treatment model that failed in trial after trial?

Asking for 20 million friends.

 

When a paper like this gets retracted, what exactly happens with other papers that cited it?

 

I disagree, the bullies/reality deniers use everything from abrasiveness to threats to lies. And when a victim speaks up they are the ones accused of being abrasive, bullies or liars. It is meant to keep the victims downtrodden, so while we should not become their evil and use threats or lies i have no problem with being abrasive, outspoken or determined to right wrongs.
Non bullies being meek is a culturally enforced behaviour that is meant to protect the status quo and bullies.

 

Personally I consider the first of those adjectives to be very different from the second and third (which I totally 100% support). The trouble is, whilst I think the ME/CFS community absolutely has the right to be angry, that is not the same as it being tactically effective.

 

I can think of lots of times when patients expressing anger has been used to hurt them, led to them being dismissed, or being used against all patients. I can't think of a single time it has been helpful.

 

When your fighting a powerful and intractable enemy everything you do must be tactically chosen.

When people protest injsutice being meek gets them nowhere.
We should not become the evil we oppose but being meek will mean we fail.

I get it, it feels intuitive to go with culturally sanctioned norms and ways of doing things.

 

I wouldn't describe Kindlon's approach as 'meek', but his carefully researched, calm and measured advocacy efforts seem to have been useful. I think that is the sort of approach that people like Wessely are really concerned about as it's very difficult for other people to dismiss as 'angry activists'. That judgement is not based on culturally sanctioned norms, but on what I have seen happen over the last twenty years.

 

In some ways I agree, but I think that there are unusual difficulties around ME that make that sort of dynamic eve more difficult to pull off than it has been in other circumstances. I think that we need to be 'radical' in our aims, but also cautious and restrained in our methods.

There's an unusually high cost to certain sorts of 'radicalism' for us.

egs of why I think it's hard for us to adopt strategies that have been useful for other groups:

- We really have very little power. We don't have a load of health people happy to cause trouble and disrupt those who are trying to ignore reasonable concerns.

- We're really actively working against the interests of a lot of the people who have power over us. Also, if we win on an issue like PACE is is going to be humiliating for entire institutions and systems. There's no real way of making progress with a compromise on a lot of these issues and there best tactic is to try to smear all their critics as radical and unreasonable.

- What we're doing is weird and unusual - a patient led movement pointing out that the 'experts' in a field of science have been doing poor quality work that exaggerates the benefits of supposed treatments is not the usual way of doing things. More often it's patients desperate for 'hope' being told 'no real evidence' by rigorous scientists.

- The fact that CBT and GET are often viewed as 'psychological' therapies means that any criticism of CBT/GET research can be presented as driven by an ideologically driven opposition to a psychological understanding of ME by those who hold stigmatising views about mental health problems.

- Also, ME being viewed as a mental health problem serves to help justify stigmatising views of patients critical of work like PACE.

- The 'angry, unreasonable activists' meme is popular amongst a lot of people and they feel able to justify dismissing patient concern by just using rare examples of people crossing the line.

- and so on, and so on...

It seems that for a lot of the people with power, criticising PACE/Wessely/etc is 'radical'. To speak honestly of the problems around ME/CFS is to be outside of the 'mainstream' in an important sense, and that makes it very difficult to get the 'good cop/bad cop' dynamic that is a part of a lot of advocacy efforts.

This is all very irritating. For me personally, I hate being polite, especially by the appalling standards of the UK Establishment. But at the same time, I've seen how almost any sort of 'rudeness' is used against us. The fact that people who've been so badly mistreated are expected to be consistently polite in their criticisms of those who've behaved badly is shameful - but again, if we want to make progress I think that we need to make our criticisms of even that in a restrained and polite manner.

PS: I'm still half asleep.

 

I think this is hard to gauge from past efforts. In the past it was more individual efforts and no one was been heard very well. That goes for either Tom Kindlon and his style or more strident actions of others. 20 years ago no-one gained any traction.

I think the difference now is the coalescence of people working together supporting the people who are able to do the big work of writing and responding to all the nonsense. I don't think it was ever necessarily about the tone that made the difference. It's only been a few short years that we've seen real movement. And there are other reasons to point to as well as what I said above--the inclusion of serious medical researchers, David Tuller's blog, freedom of info requests granted.

Abrasiveness can be in the eye of the beholder as we well know from M Sharpe's communication. He takes umbrage at almost everything we say. It's true that any more forward in your face approach needs to be careful about the facts but just because it's called out with nasty name calling shouldn't be a reason to be quiet IMO.

 

I agree he has had success, and as mentioned

And how have they achieved success pedaling their lies? Not by following your approach.
They have lied, cheated, lashed out at us, committed fraud, called us everything in the book, had people taken away and essentially tortured and so on. They have been evil.
We should not become their evil but if we fall into their trap of failing to stand up for ourselves because they have painted us as evil then they will keep winning, they are heroic, we are mean, evil, terrible, lying victims. We can fall into their trap or we can take the high risk of rejecting it. They are bullying us, we can accept the role they paint for us or we can reject it with boldness and conviction.
As history has shown to defeat evil we must stand up to it and we must have our hands clean. Hence we should not become evil like them but we should not allow them to keep us down. Their militant patients BS is meant to turn the public against us. This is no different then what tyrants have done to their subjects throughout history. They were not defeated by comfortable culturally sanctioned disagreement.

Obviosuly i won't convince anyone to get out of their comfort zone because thats scary.

 

They might get an email.
https://retracted.net/

Or people may continue to cite it, possibly without even knowing it was retracted.
https://qz.com/583497/researchers-keep-citing-these-retracted-papers/

 

Medicine seriously needs to adopt versioning repositories. This state of things is completely unacceptable and frankly pathetic. It's 19th century thinking badly using 21st century technology.

Mature versioning repositories keep track of issues specific to versions and can issue alerts to invalidated versions. This is tried and tested to maturity in software development. The entire ecosystem of academic publishing is utterly broken, stuck in the past because it would stop a gravy train of superfluous middle agents who make billions out of being nothing but a necessary step in the process despite adding nothing of value.