Trial By Error: The School Absence Study, Revisited (Crawley/SMILE)

Did anyone notice this comment in the COPE agenda paper -

"The author indicated that similar requests had been made in the past and that, due to the controversial area of the work, many attempts were being made to retract articles that used the data from the clinic."

I wonder which papers are trying to be retracted and what data they have in them which is not going to stand up to scrutiny? Seems that maybe there is more to be discovered.

 

"many attempts were being made to retract articles that used the data from the clinic."

I wonder if that's true. Does anyone know of any? I can't think of any public calls for retraction of articles using data from that clinic.

It's so hard for us to know, but it's seems possible that's false.

 

I suspect Crawley may have been referring here to complaints to two other journals that were made about other Crawley papers that quoted the same REC number that the School Absence Study did. The papers in question used NOD data and I believe the complainant argued that Crawley had used the same REC number (07/Q2006/48) in the same way ie to exempt the studies from the need for research ethics approval. But that number could not have applied to these NOD studies since it referred to a small local paediatric study only, whilst the NOD was a national collection and involved adults as well as children. (See the corresponding REC application form #3 this thread).

Crawley seems to confuse a lot of things (poor love ). With her use of this erroneous REC number she inexplicably appeared to lump her clinic and the NOD together in the same bag. It may be that some or all of her clinic data ended up as part of the NOD, but the NOD was not part of her clinic. Interestingly, the University of Bristol seemed similarly confused in the May 2017 statement that they produced and that was cited by Aldcroft in defence of the BMJ Open's publication of the School Absence Study.

 

I should add (to what I said in #63 above) that -

The other point raised in these complaints about NOD papers was that the researchers had the express intention to use the NOD collection for the purposes of providing infrastructure for their future research AT THE TIME that they were asking patients (who were referred to NHS CFS/ME services after 2009/10) to complete the NOD questionnaires, but they didn't inform them of this intention. That surely goes against the HRA statement supplied by the University of Bristol in defence of the School Absence Study that says-

‘REC review is not required for the following types of research: Research limited to secondary use of information previously collected in the course of normal care (without an intention to use it for research at the time of collection), provided that the patients or service users are not identifiable to the research team in carrying out the research’ .

 

The complaint (of 9th February, 2017) about this paper–


Treatment outcome in adults with chronic fatigue syndrome: a prospective study in England based on the CFS/ME National Outcomes Database

https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/qjmed/hct061

Authors: E. Crawley; S.M. Collin; P.D. White; K. Rimes; J.A.C. Sterne; M.T. May; CFS/ME National Outcomes Database


- eventually (on 22nd May 2017) yielded this email response from the QJM Editor-in-Chief:


“Following on from your correspondence dated February 9th. 2017 expressing concerns in relation to the above paper, OUP has undertaken a substantive investigation of the issues you raised.

Following this investigation, our conclusion is that no corrections to this article are required at this time.”


That was all, the whole text of the email response. No explanations, evidence or defence of the study were provided.



A complaint was also sent 9th February 2017 about this paper–


The impact of CFS/ME on employment and productivity in the UK: a cross-sectional study based on the CFS/ME national outcomes database

http://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-11-217/open-peer-review

Authors: Simon M Collin, Esther Crawley, Margaret T May, Jonathan AC Sterne, William Hollingworth and UK CFS/ME National Outcomes Database


Eleven months have now elapsed with no apparent outcome and the complainant is chasing this up.

 

I didn't think this was worth starting a new thread about, although it's quite OT.

I was just reading this COPE case, and it sounds like COPE's 'investigation' just involved asking a senior person if their rules were being followed, even though it seemed clear that they were not, and then leaving it at that:

https://publicationethics.org/case/authorship-dispute-unsatisfactorily-resolved-institution

 

@Kalliope could you put Crawley in the thread title (easier to find).

found an article on the Modality Partnership website.
["Modality Partnership is a GP super-partnership that operates nationally in the UK. Our teams of doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals work hard to ensure that our patients are our number one priority. "]

"
NHS Choices - Study of chronic fatigue syndrome in children

"..............This study had several strengths, including the fact that the frequently absent children who reported unexplained fatigue were screened for medical and emotional causes of fatigue other than CFS. Another strength was that well-validated procedures were used to look for other conditions. However, there are inherent limitations to this type of study, which mean further follow-up is warranted:"

https://modalitypartnership.nhs.uk/.../2011/december/me-cfs-cause-of-school-absence

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1163441460819234816

Code:

https://twitter.com/Healthy_Control/status/1163441460819234816

https://twitter.com/user/status/1164332943268966401

Code:

https://twitter.com/some_wise/status/1164332943268966401

https://twitter.com/user/status/1163802083847487489

Code:

https://twitter.com/Healthy_Control/status/1163802083847487489

https://twitter.com/user/status/1163803297783975936

Code:

https://twitter.com/Healthy_Control/status/1163803297783975936

Thank you @Caroline Struthers

 

Actually, the journal closed the case itself, it would seem, without acting on COPE's advice to investigate further. The COPE statement from the journal was full of misleading information and actually false information--such as the claim that the study involved anonymous data when in fact Crawley interviewed many dozens of minors and parents in person. BMJ Open has acted in completely bad faith throughout this process. They lied to COPE and they lied in their responses to me.

 

Oh well, looking forward to when this blows up in people's faces with everything thoroughly-documented and too blatant to sweep away. It will make people look into everything else this lot did.

Sadly more people will get hurt until then. But all of this "institutional exoneration" accomplishes is reeling more people in and expose how thoroughly things have been broken in order to push through the BPS model. The fish truly is rotten from the head down.

 

How can you still sound so confident about that at this point?!

 

I think it is reasonable to be confident, even if in the last couple of years a dozen or so straws have not bothered the camel too much (to digress from piscine metaphors).

The whole thing has a level of absurdity that means that it has to fall apart one day. Even in Simon Wessely' first email to me about five years ago I sensed that he could see things unravelling.

 

I think that things were steadily getting worse for them then... the last couple of years they've realised that they can still get away with ignoring the valid concerns about their work and focussing on handful of patients who say stupid things. They've somehow been able to act as if the null results for their prespecified recovery criteria just show how unreasonable patients are. Also they've been effective at drawing on support from other Establishment figures and generating evasive BS like the HRA letter that we haven't had the capacity to pick apart in detail ("the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it"). We've got the on-going smears and bigotry from the Guardian/Reuters. They're getting more influential people/institutions involved with a personal investment in defending PACE and smearing critics and we're not doing so well at gaining new allies imo.

I was more confident things were unravelling for them five years ago than I am now.

 

We will see.

 

This

 

The Wilshire paper should have sunk them, but instead their colleagues closed ranks.

It seems that psychiatry is more interested in protecting their profession than making the world a better place.

If people outside of psychiatry cared about ME this would be different.

 

Time. It grinds finely. Entropy is the greatest equalizer.

Years. Decades. Who knows? But it grinds.

Even Ceausescu was super jolly until the minute he wasn't. Power only lasts so long.