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S. Wessely - Death threats, abuse, smear campaigns - Standing up for Science: 29 March

Gijs

Senior Member
Messages
691
Andy Lewis wrote " continiously" can he proof his statement? No. And Andy Wessely is a very bad researcher you didn't know that. Wessely isn't a victim he is a sadist for very sick people.
 

Esther12

Senior Member
Messages
13,774
Andy Lewis wrote " continiously" can he proof his statement? No. And Andy Wessely is a very bad researcher you didn't know that. Wessely isn't a victim he is a sadist for very sick people.

I don't think he's a sadist. I don't think he takes pleasure in the harm he's done. I just think that his own comfort and career is more important to him than being honest about how badly he's got things wrong.
 

user9876

Senior Member
Messages
4,556
I don't think he's a sadist. I don't think he takes pleasure in the harm he's done. I just think that his own comfort and career is more important to him than being honest about how badly he's got things wrong.

I think he has a lot of company in the UK scientific community thinking his comfort and career are more important than the science. In discussing open data a lot of UK academics were saying yes but we must have sufficient time first to ensure we can publish everything possible before sharing -- basically to boost their career rather than helping scientific advances by sharing data.
 

slysaint

Senior Member
Messages
2,125
Last edited:

user9876

Senior Member
Messages
4,556
There are some interesting tweets from Janet Eastham concerning questions she managed to ask

Sounds like Wessely is defending bad practice and the audience is lapping it up with the facilitator ensuring he doesn't have to answer difficult questions.

His comments on recovery are really quite outrageous in terms of saying we want recovery so we set thresholds to give it.
 

Gijs

Senior Member
Messages
691
SW: ''we are in a world of patiënts reported outcomes'', not objective outcomes Wessely doesn't have any problems with that. Mmm interesting. So if patiënts reported positive findings they use it , and if they reported harm, they ignore it because there is no objective proof for these claims in reviews. Look a little bit silly to me.
 

Chrisb

Senior Member
Messages
1,051
SW seeks to distinguish between criticism and abuse, and says that criticism is fine. One would have thought the distinction was often so apparent that one would not need to mention, in passing, comments of the Lord Chief Justice.

Perhaps you can help me. Is it criticism or abuse of patients to say, to anyone prepared to listen, that patients' symptoms are perpetuated by false illness beliefs?

I tend to think it depends upon where you are standing.
 

TreePerson

Senior Member
Messages
292
Location
U.K.
The Andy Lewis guy seems very keen to defend Wessley and overly critical of the ME community. He describes the Twitter thread (beneath the tweet quoted above) as evidence that the arguments are abusive. I'm relatively new to all this but I couldn't see anything abusive in the Twitter thread. It was highly critical but actually quite moderate considering what can happen on Twitter. Is Andy Lewis known for defending Wessley and being unfairly critical of ME patients? It crossed my mind that someone who is interested in debunking quackery might rather enjoy the idea that there is a large group of people who imagine they are ill. It would appeal to a certain cynical mindset.
 

Esther12

Senior Member
Messages
13,774
One would have thought the distinction was often so apparent that one would not need to mention, in passing, comments of the Lord Chief Justice.

I didn't see that ... is there more transcript available?
 

Large Donner

Senior Member
Messages
866
SW: ''we are in a world of patiënts reported outcomes'', not objective outcomes"

Except they dropped all the objective measures and the subjective measures provided a null result once the data was released after they changed the recovery definition because "they realised no one would have recovered otherwise", and people could be defined as recovered yet still ill enough to enter the trial at the same time.

Laughter from the scientific community worldwide.

Real objective laughter.

Except Wessely is still living in the subjective wherby he can just ignore the rest of the scientific community worldwide because, well, "thats what we do in the world of psychiatry".
 

Large Donner

Senior Member
Messages
866
His comments on recovery are really quite outrageous in terms of saying we want recovery so we set thresholds to give it.

Actually Wessely is being very clever here in his usual play with words. He actually says...

THEY changed the recovery measures

And he keeps reminding people that did not play any part in this trial so he can at any time go back to any previous statement he desires if things go wrong for the BPS crowd.