Richard Smith who was the editor of BMJ until 2004 wrote a blog post regarding KCL denial of Coyne's request for PACE data.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2015/12/16...lege-should-release-data-from-the-pace-trial/
The piece trots out every canard and backhanded insult you'd expect.
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2015/12/16...lege-should-release-data-from-the-pace-trial/
The piece trots out every canard and backhanded insult you'd expect.
Several times when I was the editor of The BMJ the journal was declared the worst medical journal in the world by the ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) Association. Sometimes we shared the award with The Lancet. At another time my wife was telephoned and told that if I didn’t take a different line on ME (which is better known as chronic fatigue syndrome) then “something horrible” would happen to me. So I know something about the emotion that surrounds chronic fatigue syndrome, but I still that think that Queen Mary College London (QMUL) and King’s College London are making a serious mistake in refusing to release the data behind a controversial trial of treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome.
The emotion stems from sufferers from the condition resenting greatly the idea that it may have psychological causes with the stigma that implies. The resentment seems to be that psychological problems are not seen “real” in the way that physical ones are and that they may result from “moral weakness” rather than a morally neutral virus. I’ve always disliked the stigma that goes with mental illness and any idea that it is not as real or serious as physical illness. But at the same time neither I nor The BMJ had a line on the causes or treatments of chronic fatigue syndrome. We simply published what we thought was the best research on the subject that we were sent and commissioned material from the people we thought best informed on the subject. It’s true that several of those people were psychiatrists, but that didn’t mean that we thought chronic fatigue syndrome to be a psychological condition. We had open minds.