Trial By Error: What's Going On, BMJ Best Practice?

By David Tuller:
Trial By Error: What's Going on, BMJ Best Practice?

- Something’s weird over at BMJ Best Practice, a resource for clinical decision-making and an arm of the BMJ Publishing Group.

- As we noted in an update yesterday, the document we reviewed was dated July 31, 2017. Shortly after the blog was posted, we learned that a more recently updated version of the guide, dated November 13th, did not include Professor White’s name as a reviewer.

- Moreover, thanks to sharp-eyed patients, some other anomalies were soon revealed. Besides the removal of Professor White’s name as a reviewer, the new version of the guide has at least one other major change. In a section at the end on “Evidence Scores” (p. 58 in the July version of the guide and p. 63 in the November version), the following sentence has been deleted from the later edition:
“Graded exercise therapy and overall improvement: there is poor-quality evidence that graded exercise therapy results in greater overall improvement in symptoms and functioning.

- Finally, I was also sent a three-page BMJ Best Practice patient leaflet purportedly drawn from the larger guide. This leaflet is dated November 13th, like the later version of the guide. Unlike the guide itself, the leaflet appears to portray chronic fatigue syndrome as a condition largely characterized by extended “tiredness.”

 

Weird stuff. The BMJ seems pretty institutionally against us. I think that they care about Wessely's reputation (and want to avoid acknowledging their own failings).

 

They say it's about who you know, not what you know. I'm highly confident that SW and co know how to play that game only too well.

 

At least the summary contains this reference:

 

Has anyone got a copy of the new guidance? It would be interesting to put it through some software that lets us find all the changes.

edit: got a copy now, thanks.

 

Gosh what software does that?

 

Something like this? https://www.diffchecker.com/

Haven't tried it yet. May have to break it into chunks.

 

Thanks.

I hope it works it would be interesting to see what exactly had been removed.