Use of EEfRT in the NIH study: Deep phenotyping of PI-ME/CFS, 2024, Walitt et al

I was only able to skim it briefly but it looks like a good blog that identified many of the same issues discussed here on the S4ME thread.

One issue that has the title 'False Recording of EEfRT Data' was new to me. Burmeister argues that there are errors in the raw data because the value 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' is often 1 when 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1' is 0. So that would suggest that the reward is given even when the participant did not successfully complete the trial.

However, this seem to have happened more than 60 times which is quite a lot. Another possible explanation is that Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1 is simply the end result of the probability that the reward would be given (yes or no). A bit like you toss a coin and write up the end result: head or tails. If that is the case, then the rewards given are those that have a value of 1 for 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' and for 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1' (instead of only 1 for 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' which Burmeister calculated).

If I do that, I get slightly different results for the mean reward per group.

55.54 dollar for controls
48.42 dollar for patients​

So patients had a lower amount, but not because of hard task avoidance but because of lower successful completion rates.
 
Last edited:
Sorry if this is the wrong thread but I’m just dumping these Tweets here while I have the links as I’m running out of gas and they are indirectly relevant to the discussion above as they are by the same author:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1771087988379758911

https://twitter.com/user/status/1771273333931131277

https://twitter.com/user/status/1771455499247956149

https://twitter.com/user/status/1771595955475030150
Click to expand...


I also noted this from part one of Burmeister’s blog series on EEfRT (https://thoughtsaboutme.com/2024/06/10/1/):
Note that the abstract refers to ME as a “disorder” in blunt contravention of the 2011 expert Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: International Consensus Criteria (ICC) and the NIH-funded 2015 clinical definition by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) (now National Academy of Medicine). It is also untrue that there are no disease-modifying treatments. There are a number of treatments that improve ME symptoms, including the immune-modulator and antiviral Ampligen, which is extremely effective in a sizable group of properly identified ME patients. What would have been accurate to say is that the FDA has been derelict in its duty to approve Ampligen, which has been in FDA-approved trials for decades, and other clearly effective therapeutics for ME. Of course, the claim that the patient-selection process was rigorous is self-serving and false as well as has been discussed many times and is addressed further in Parts 3 and 4 of this article. Finally, NIH just had to throw in the trope that ME is poorly understood, conflating their refusal to accept the findings of many thousands of peer-reviewed, published papers by ME researchers documenting the biomedical abnormalities of the disease with a lack of understanding of the disease. The abstract set the tone for the rest of the paper.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
However, this seem to have happened around 60 times which is quite a lot. Another possible explanation is that Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1 is simply the end result of the probability that the reward would be given (yes or no). A bit like you toss a coin and write up the end result: head or tails. If that is the case, then the rewards given are those that have a value of 1 for 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' and for 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1' (instead of only 1 for 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' which Burmeister calculated).
Click to expand...
I don’t quite understand this. Apologies if I’m being dim but can you or anyone else make it clearer?

I think it’s important for any analysis to understand which interpretation is correct. If ME/CFS Skeptic’s suggested interpretation is correct, it does not invalidate other criticisms, but if an incorrect interpretation is used in any published analyses it could be used to deflect attention from and discredit valid criticisms.
 
In the experiment, participants had a chance to receive a (virtual) reward in each trial round if they were able to achieve the required number of button presses. This was a requirement but they did not get it each time they achieved the required number of button presses. There was also a probability that the reward was actually given: either 12%, 50% or 80%. So in orde to receive an reward, you have to be successful but also have a bit of luck.

Now in the raw data there is a variable called' 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1'. The most logical explanation of this is that indicates whether the reward was given or not. This is what Burmeister assumed. But then there is the issue that in 60 rows of the raw data this 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' is set to 1 (yes) while the other variable 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1' is 0 (no). So that would suggest that the reward is given even when the participant did not successfully complete the trial which should not be possible. Burmeister therefore assumes that these are errors and they certainly could be.

But because it happened so often I was wondering if the variable 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' might indicate something different. Perhaps it is simply the end result of running the probabilities (12%, 50% or 80%) without taking successful completion into account. A bit like tossing a coin that has a 50% of getting tails and you write down 1 if it was tails and 0 if it was head. If that is the case then the rewards that were given are only those that have a score of 1 for both 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' and 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1'.

This is just off the top of my head. Don't have the energy at the moment to analyse Burmeister's blog or go back to the original paper. Hope others will have a more thorough look.
 
Last edited:
This makes the whole "stop criticizing us or we'll be sad and give up" look even worse. They can't possibly not understand that the criticism is fair and accurate, this was as egregious as what PACE did. They could have made this BS test some minor element with 1-2 mentions but they chose to make it the bulk of the study's interpretation. Even having made it a minor element the study would have been largely a waste because they made so many poor decisions along the way, and had the wrong people in charge of it. On purpose.

One thing I noticed is that the blog mentions that it isn't clear why the fringe control was dropped, but I think we discussed this here, that they considered that he didn't play the game as they wanted it, but that control actually played the optimal strategy, and throwing away his data is what tipped the tiny significance, which is obviously why they did even though there was a much stronger case to throw away the data from the patients who couldn't perform the hard tasks.

As is tradition, it's worse in context and the more context you add the worse it is. This paper has to be retracted. As badly as PACE. It probably won't because the goal is not to help us, but to push the same ideological quackery. Walitt has no business being involved in medical research and we were fully right to object to his involvement. He is as much an ideologue as Wessely.

This also makes the lengthy delays look even worse. This paper has nothing groundbreaking to it, it was published in a 2nd tier paper at best and basically all they've been doing ever since is damage control, saying somewhat the opposite of what is clear in the paper, which is about as coherent as clinics who argue that they must do GET, on the basis of GET studies, but that what they do isn't called GET, it's different, even though it isn't.

The main problem with politics is being unable for people to agree on what reality is, on what facts are. Science is supposed to be able to work based on facts, it's supposed to matter. And yet decade after decade we see people doing obviously wrong nonsense like this, in ways that fully betray that they know what they're doing, they're just confident that there's nothing we can do about it.
 
Now that I think about this, there is probably an easy way to test this. The mean of 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' is 0.48 and if I take the mean for each of the probabilities of reward it looks like this.

upload_2024-6-13_16-0-32.png

So yes I think this variable does not take successful completion into account and simply reflects the probability of reward. It looks to be running the probability of the luck factor.
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
Now that I think about this, there is probably an easy way to test this. The mean of 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' is 0.48 and if I take the mean for each of the probabilities of reward it looks like this.

View attachment 22036

So yes I think this variable does not take successful completion into account and simply reflects the probability of reward. It looks to be running the probability of the luck factor.
Click to expand...
Thanks for doing this and for the explanation. Yes, I think you’re right. I will bring it to Jeannette’s attention on Xitter, as well the point Richard makes above about why control F was dropped. Does anyone know if she’s on S4ME?
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
In the experiment, participants had a chance to receive a (virtual) reward in each trial round if they were able to achieve the required number of button presses. This was a requirement but they did not get it each time they achieved the required number of button presses. There was also a probability that the reward was actually given: either 12%, 50% or 80%. So in orde to receive an reward, you have to be successful but also have a bit of luck.

Now in the raw data there is a variable called' 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1'. The most logical explanation of this is that indicates whether the reward was given or not. This is what Burmeister assumed. But then there is the issue that in 60 rows of the raw data this 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' is set to 1 (yes) while the other variable 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1' is 0 (no). So that would suggest that the reward is given even when the participant did not successfully complete the trial which should not be possible. Burmeister therefore assumes that these are errors and they certainly could be.

But because it happened so often I was wondering if the variable 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' might indicate something different. Perhaps it is simply the end result of running the probabilities (0.12%, 0.5% or 0.8%) without taking successful completion into account. A bit like tossing a coin that has a 50% of getting tails and you write down 1 if it was tails and 0 if it was head. If that is the case then the rewards that were given are only those that have a score of 1 for both 'Reward_Granted_Yes_is_1' and 'Successful_Completion_Yes_is_1'.

This is just off the top of my head. Don't have the energy at the moment to analyse Burmeister's blog or go back to the original paper. Hope others will have a more thorough look.
Click to expand...
I seem to remember from looking at the sheets of raw data that it is your interpretation ie probability outcome.

whereas I think number of clicks was what I used to see if people achieved the hard task


It’s a while back now so feel cagey in case I mislead but do remember having similar questions as I poked through working out the sheets and variables and task etc.
 
As @rvallee mentioned this above, I’m sharing @Murph’s excellent post from earlier in the thread, which shows that Healthy Volunteer F was playing an optimal strategy – and that EEfRT is fundamentally flawed:

Murph said:
Healthy control F matters a lot. They chucked his data, but what his data shows is that EEfRT is a joke. To understand why I'm going to ask you to Imagine a lottery...

1. ... you will win two prizes drawn from a barrel. This is a pretty great lottery, because you choose the prizes that go in a barrel. I give you a choice. I have 50 prizes we can put in the barrel, some worth $1, some worth $2, some worth $3, some worth $4. You may put in as few or as many as you like. Would you put in 50 of many different values? Or simply put in two prizes both worth $4?

2. Remember that in the effort preference test you get paid for two of your wins. If you have only a few wins, those will be the ones NIH pay out on. Like putting just two prizes in the barrel. If you could complete two wins worth $4.12 and that's all, the NIH would pay you $8.24.

3. And that's what's healthy control F tried to do. He lost on purpose when the prize was low. To win on easy you had to press 30 times. He would chose easy and stop on exactly 29. He was playing an optimal strategy to maximise payout. IN other words, he was trying his hardest to win the game. That confused the researchers. They chucked the data out.

This next chart shows each round and how often he pushed the button. When he wins the round, I outlined it in green.

View attachment 21261


Healthy volunteer F is a 21 year old male. The four trial rounds show he can easily do the button-pressing. In what follows he chooses not to.

This next chart is the same as the above, but with a bit more information. It shows that he played to win only the rounds where the prize was high. After he got a feel for the range of prizes on offer, he chose hard and completed the task only when the prize was over $3.50. If the prize was low he didn't try to win (except round 23, where even if you did win there was only a 12% probability of the prize being awarded and added to the metaphorical prize basket).

View attachment 21262

4. So it turns out the test was solvable. Most people just tried to push buttons as much as they could. But this guy understood it. It meant he mostly chose easy. That confounded the primary endpoint (how often do you choose hard). The metric is supposedly validated in depressed people ; looks like they didn't battle-test it enough!

5. No other participant took it to the same extreme. But there are signs others flirted with a similar strategy, choosing easy and not trying to win in certain rounds. Throwing out the data of only one participant is suss. Smarter would be to drop the whole metric. Certainly drawing major conclusions based on such a fundamentally flawed game is dumb.

tl;dr, despite what they think, the EEfRT can be played strategically rendering it void as a measure of anything.
Click to expand...


@andrewkq, did you get a reply to your email enquiry about this? (Apologies if you shared it and I missed it.)
 
Jeannette said:
With respect to the NIH study, there has been a clear pattern of the investigators trying to defend their inability to replicate well established abnormalities in ME, raising important questions of cohort selection (both the patients and the control cohorts). Whenever the authors are confronted with uncomfortable questions—for example, their failure to find POTS in ME patients—they are quick to point out, as an excuse, that this was an exploratory, hypothesis-generating study with a small cohort. And yet, the small cohort size was no deterrent for the authors to claim that ME is defined by patients underestimating their capacity. Heads they win; tails we lose.
Click to expand...

But the issue wasn't that they didn't find POTS in the patients. The issue is that the healthy controls also had POTS.



The discussion about orthostatic intolerance continues here
Orthostatic Intolerance in PwME (POTS?/NMH?)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Jonathan Edwards said:
I may be have been naïve, but to begin with I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. But every time I go through these three stages now:

1. I can see that there are so many confounding factors and potential biases that results reported are not going to mean much anyway. I tend not to analyse further.
2. When others struggle through the data (or when I see a truncated Y axis when copying a graph to us at NICE) it becomes clear that there wasn't even a meaningful result.
3. Tracking the history it becomes clear that the authors must have known 1 and 2. In fact they had worked very hard to conceal both.
Click to expand...
I have learned the hard way over the decades that every time I think I might be going a little too hard on the ME-is-psychosomatic crowd they soon prove me completely wrong.

They really are that bad. They really are a virulent cult.

It is now beyond any possible dispute that the medical profession is clearly incapable of reforming itself on this issue.

There is going to have to be a major intervention from the rest of science.

I am not holding my breath.
 
The next blog post by Jeanette Burmeister

https://thoughtsaboutme.com/2024/06...e-study-lies-damn-lies-and-statistics-part-3/


"In this Part 3, I will discuss the EEfRT as a psychological measure, NIH’s frantic attempt of damage control in response to the firestorm reaction to the intramural paper, the agency’s decades-long obfuscating characterization of ME as merely fatiguing, its reframing of fatigue in ME as being purely subjective, the investigator’s fear of using a second-day exercise test, and NIH’s ongoing research of an allegedly dysfunctional Effort Preference in ME."

I need to start reading. It's a lengthy paper but not as complex as part 2. Interesting content.
 
Part 3 is taking me longer to read than I expected. I think this may be because it is based on a much deeper knowledge of the background to this study than I have, as well as the individuals referred to in the paper and the politics surrounding it all. Maybe our US members might be more familiar with all this.
I have some hospital appointments tomorrow and later in the week so I won't finish it but will post what I've read.



Jeanette began part 3 by arguing EEfRT is a psychological measure and was
developed specifically for use in psychiatric populations....and so should therefore not have been used on a physical illness.
"Claiming that the EEfRT is not a psychological measure is simply untrue."

The NIH has responded by arguing that it is not a psych concept, and bringing in senior staff ( Komaroff and Koroshetz) to emphasise that ME is real ( thus drawing attention to the fact that not everyone believes this) and to praise Walitt and Nath.

She outlines how the NIH supports the study and offers a critique.

"Koroshetz labored to persuade the audience that effort means something different to neurologists than it does to the lay person. He claimed that the study has shown that there is a computational problem in the brain of the ME patients that leads to them unconsciously overestimating effort and/or underestimating rewards due to no fault of their own. He was emphatic when he said that NIH is not claiming that patients do not want to make an effort, except that that is exactly how the term Effort Preference will be interpreted—the only reasonable interpretation. No intellectually honest person would argue otherwise unless completely clueless".....

Jeanette argues "Linguistically, the term preference strongly suggests a choice—in this case the choice of ME patients, due to some alleged miscalculation of how much they can exert, to invest less effort than the authors claim patients safely could. "

"The NIH disagrees and claims that their reference to "effort finding is based in neurobiology. Then why not name it something that sounds like neurobiology instead of laziness?.................it would have been easy to choose a respectful, scientific designation, such as TPJ Dysfunction, but that would have defeated the purpose of the EEfRT testing. Obviously, the term Effort Preference was chosen for maximum detrimental impact on the reputation of ME patients.".......


She introduces pacing as an activity of choice.

"The finding of a difference in effort preference is consistent with how participants describe pacing. One participant describes: ‘You have to make a conscious choice of how much energy [to use and] whether or not something is worth crashing for. It’s hard because no sane person would ever participant [sic] to suffer and … that’s what you’re doing [by choosing] an activity that will make you crash. You are going to suffer… You have to decide what gives you meaning and what is worth it to you.’” [emphasis added]"

It is a lengthy paper.
 
Final blog post in the "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" series by Jeannette Burmeister:

The NIH Intramural ME Study: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” (Part 4)
Readers who are not intricately familiar with ME history and politics might ask themselves how we got here. How is it possible that investigators with a glaring bias were allowed to be in a position to abuse this study to confirm their prejudices, set ME research back, and further damage the reputation of ME patients, leading to great harm?
Click to expand...


Ends with a call to action:
I urge readers to file complaints by sharing my four-part analysis with the following authorities:

  1. your U.S. Senators and Representatives
  2. the NIH Director, Dr. Monica Bertagnolli:
    • monica.bertagnolli@nih.gov
  3. the Director of Research Integrity and the Agency Intramural Research Integrity Officer (AIRIO), Dr. Kathy Partin (https://oir.nih.gov/sourcebook/ethical-conduct/research-misconduct):
  4. the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG). OIG complaints can be filed in a variety of ways as follows:
    • online: https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/report-fraud/
    • by U.S. mail:
      • U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
        Office of Inspector General
        ATTN: OIG HOTLINE OPERATIONS
        P.O. Box 23489
        Washington, DC 20026
    • by fax: (800) 223-8164
with requests to:

  1. investigate the study
    1. with respect to potential gross misconduct and potential research misconduct, including, but not limited to, falsification of data, i.e., manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record
    2. constituting a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community and committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly,
  2. discipline any individuals involved in of the foregoing improprieties, if any, and
  3. retract the NIH intramural study.
As we cannot know all the individuals who were involved with the EEfRT testing, the complaints should be made against:

  1. Dr. Avindra Nath as principal investigator of the study and
  2. any other individuals at NIH involved in the EEfRT testing in any way (including, but not limited to, the design, administration, and interpretation of the EEfRT testing), including, but not limited to, Dr. Brian Walitt and Dr. Nicholas Madian.
Please feel free to use the following summary of some of the potential misconduct, the inclusion of which in your correspondence may expedite the authorities’ determination to investigate the matter. Please make it clear that this is a non-exhaustive list of potential misconduct:

  1. The inclusion in the paper of a graph, Figure 3a, in order to support the Effort Preference claim, that was the result of statistical manipulation resulting in a completely misleading presentation of the data, which, when graphed, present a picture that contradicts Figure 3a
  2. The claim that ME patients chose fewer hard tasks than controls “at the start of and through the [EEfRT]” with Figure 3a claiming that patients chose fewer hard tasks in every single trial
    1. During the May 2, 2024 NIH Symposium on the study, Dr. Madian stated, “We did again see a difference at baseline, which persisted throughout the task, indicating differences in effort discounting.”
    2. Out of the first four trials, ME patients and controls chose the exact same number of hard tasks per participant. For the very first trial, arguably “the start” of the EEfRT, patients chose twice as many hard trials as controls, even though the patient cohort consisted of one fewer individual than the control cohort.
    3. For 34% of the trials, ME patients chose hard tasks at a higher rate than controls. For another 2% of trials, both groups chose the same percentage of hard tasks. During an additional 14% of tasks, both groups’ hard-task choices were nearly identical, and the difference was, therefore, not statistically significant.
  3. The inclusion of randomly assigned tasks (hard versus easy) in the analysis of hard-task choices despite no choice having been made in those cases, which occurred substantially more often in the case of patients than controls and with a substantially higher percentage of the randomly assigned tasks being easy tasks in the case of patients compared to controls
  4. The omission of an analysis of the obvious impact of patients using a game optimization strategy and the conclusory claim (without discussion) that there was no resulting group difference in probability sensitivity despite the fact that there was a significant difference between groups for 12% and 50% probability trials but not for 88% probability trials, negating any basis for the Effort Preference claim
  5. The use of an improper metric, number/ratio/probability of hard-task-trial choices, in support of the Effort Preference claim, as opposed to the correct metric, the average rewards earned by both groups, for which there was no significant difference between the two groups (less than 1%), negating any basis for the Effort Preference claim
  6. The failure to address or even acknowledge significant confounding factors and to attempt to control for them or at least minimize their impact, contrary to other EEfRT studies, for example:
    1. the failure to exclude from the EEfRT patients taking benzodiazepines
    2. the failure to control for patients’ motoric or other physical impairment to complete hard tasks by calibrating the maximum required button-press rates to individual physical ability despite numerous prior EEfRT studies emphasizing the need to do so
    3. the failure, contrary to what prior EEfRT studies have done, to exclude five patients who were physically unable to complete hard tasks at a reasonable rate or at all (the combined hard-task completion for those five patients was less than 16%) leading to a significant group difference in the ability to complete hard tasks (96.43% for controls versus 67.07% for patients), invalidating the EEfRT data and analysis
      • During the May 2, 2024 NIH Symposium of the study, Dr. Madian stated, “What the [original EEfRT] paper describes is that the EEfRT was designed so that the sample of patients used within that original study could consistently complete the task. This does not mean that everyone who takes the task must be able to complete the task without issue for the administration or data to be valid or interpretable. It seems that the creators wanted to ensure that in general as many people as possible would be able to complete the task but without compromising the task’s ability to challenge participants. Furthermore, I think, it bears mentioning that although our ME participants did not complete the task at the same 96-100% rate as the participants in the original study or at the same rate as our healthy controls, they still completed the task a large majority of the time. To wrap things up, to answer the question, consistently completing the task is not a requirement for a valid EEfRT test administration, and by all accounts we believe our data is valid and is, thus, interpretable as a measure of impaired effort discounting.” This is a misrepresentation of the what the original EEfRT study found (required task completion by “all subjects”) and what subsequent EEfRT studies have stressed. Furthermore, it is untrue that patients “completed the task a large majority of the time.”
  7. The inappropriate use of a test (the EEfRT), that was designed for and has been exclusively used for mental-health issues (or in healthy individuals), in order to support a novel and newly introduced term and concept, Effort Preference, in a physical disease
  8. The failure to discuss the validity of the use of the EEfRT in an unprecented way, i.e., to measure alleged disrupted effort discounting as opposed to the established use of EEfRT results as an assessment of effort-based, reward-based motivation
  9. The failure to identify any limitations of the EEfRT testing contrary to what other EEfRT studies have invariably done
  10. The failure to exclude the data of four “spontaneously recovered” ME patients (about a quarter of the patient cohort), a recovery rate well above of what has been found by credible researchers, indicating that at least some of those patients were misdiagnosed
  11. The over-generalization of the unsupported Effort Preference claim beyond the expending of effort for small gambling rewards, i.e., for any effort exertion by ME patients
  12. The over-generalization of the unsupported Effort Preference claim to millions of ME patients worldwide based on the one-time EEfRT performance of 15 ME patients, some of whom seem to have been misdiagnosed
  13. The inclusion of data from healthy controls with diseases that have substantial symptom overlap with ME (orthostatic issues in high numbers, Chronic Lyme Disease, and Psoriasis) as well as the inclusions of two blood relatives (siblings) of ME patients in the study despite the fact that there seems to be at least an infectious component to ME
  14. The choice of a new and exceedingly prejudicial label for a patient community that has suffered grave harm from decades of misrepresentation of the disease nature and from sustained and relentless defamation, including by NIH
  15. The use of three vastly different criteria (two of which are overly broad) for patient selection, including one set of criteria, the IOM definition, that is not a research definition, which likely resulted in including individuals in the patient group who were not ME patients
  16. The claim to have established the ME phenotype based on an exploratory, hypothesis-generating study of a cohort of only 17 patients, with many tests run only on even smaller sub-subsets of patients
  17. The misrepresentation of the nature of ME by reducing it to mere fatigue, exercise intolerance, malaise, and cognitive complaints, which is a non-specific description that does not capture ME, a multi-system disease with a variety of other disabling symptoms
  18. The assigning of a researcher to design the study and run its day-to-day activities, Dr. Brian Walitt, who is on record with his unscientific views of ME, for example, that it is merely a normal way of experiencing life and not a medical entity
  19. The hostility, derision, and unprofessional conduct by the principal investigator Dr. Avindra Nath, a high-level civil servant, toward the ME community:
    1. his persistent demands of unqualified praise from the ME community,
    2. his veiled threats as well as his overt intimidation with respect to future ME research in an attempt to silence criticism by advocates of the intramural study and NIH’s research and conduct, causing pain and suffering to ME patients,
    3. his presenting himself as a victim of ME advocates, gravely sick patients, causing reputational harm to the ME and ME advocacy community, and
    4. his relentless stressing that he and the other researchers in the study have allegedly been forced to donate their time and work without compensation for ME patients
Click to expand...
 
forestglip said:
Final blog post in the "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" series by Jeannette Burmeister:

The NIH Intramural ME Study: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” (Part 4)



Ends with a call to action:
Click to expand...

3.The inclusion of randomly assigned tasks (hard versus easy) in the analysis of hard-task choices despite no choice having been made in those cases, which occurred substantially more often in the case of patients than controls and with a substantially higher percentage of the randomly assigned tasks being easy tasks in the case of patients compared to controls
Click to expand...

Hadn't spotted that particular one, but apalling if that is the case surely?

As things were so knife-edge even with all of these coincidences added in
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom