Using patient feedback to develop an intervention for Long COVID, current study by Trudie Chalder, 2022

https://twitter.com/user/status/1592941456083210240

 

It will encourage people to live a "values based life"?????

I'll never understand why they keep throwing money at that woman to do such useless research studies.

 

I suspect grant bodies like people who know how to fill in the grant applications in the right way, have a proven track record of working hard, completing the projects and publishing, regardless of the quality of the science. It also helps to have a professor or two involved and for them to be perceived as experts.

Whatever one thinks of Chalder’s scientific rigour, she undoubtedly works hard, gets published and has a high profile within her field. Just unfortunate that she lacks an understanding of research methodology.

 

Her announced funding can be seen here, https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en...c8-0ea0-4dd7-991e-2da07f1cd934)/projects.html

 

You can definitely say that Chalder and her colleagues mastered the art of producing research, as in the equivalent of movie production in the getting funding and approval and executing the thing.

They simply never had to bother beyond that because it turns out that no one cares whether the product is any good as long as it's produced the right way.

They mastered the art of bureaucracy, in a nutshell. How to work the system. How to game it by filling out the forms the right way and working behind the scenes to build political support. The rest is pretty much irrelevant past this, it gets funding and that funding leads to a huge number of published papers. Academia done by the letter, not the spirit.

 

Its also a hack around the human psychology that repeatedly seeing the same thing said over and over, even with poor evidence, ultimately most people take it as true just due to the repetition. So they don't need to produce good high quality papers they just need to keep on publishing garbage and busy doctors will just see another paper title or abstract confirming what they already know from all the other bad papers before it and keep mistreating patients. We don't win until these people can't get funding anymore.

 

Maybe (doubt it, given how it is just re-hashes normally and you can always get your interns to do the data crunching and hard yacka) but there are university research support services/admin staff that might be doing much of the legwork here. Having said that where claims are made that don't fit the truth ie x problem, y solution that doesn't solve x problem just uses non-sequitur then that would have come from the scouting and claims of the researchers - who are the admin side to question that person.

It should be being checked by the funder however for rhetoric that doesn't add up. Then we'd find such questions would be asked (by others around the academic making the claim - because for one they'd want a name next to the accountability), answered and addressed. Someone isn't asking these questions for some reason (too scared? not given capability? nothing else to fund? old to do a waive through? politics? doesn't have the knowledge and hasn't been given a list of people who aren't conflicted and could see through rhetoric etc?)