Pediatrician Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s mathematically and factually challenged grant magnet, has released what seem to be the first outcome results from her much-hyped but fatally flawed FITNET-NHS trial—and they are disastrous. The trial, a pediatric study of online CBT based on similar Dutch research that (falsely) claimed to have proven the effectiveness of the intervention, was granted around one million pounds by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research.
The findings were presented in a poster presentation at a conference last month in Copenhagen. The title: “Cost-Effectiveness of Online Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Children with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: FITNET-NHS.” The poster was published in the journal Value in Health this month. The conclusion was blunt: “FITNET-NHS (online CBT) is unlikely to be cost-effective compared to online Activity Management within the first 12-months.”
And here’s the larger take-home message: If you spend years over-interpreting unimpressive research findings and making inflated and grandiose claims about the rehabilitative powers of treatment with CBT/GET, regardless of whether the intervention is delivered individually or in groups, in person or online, accompanied by music therapy or not, naked or fully clothed (to ensure I don’t get accused of inaccuracy, I’ll point out this last point is a joke!), at some point your bullshit will come to light. This maxim applies in spades to Professor Crawley, a repeat violator of long-standing scientific standards.
A few years ago, after an investigation prompted by my complaints to the UK’s Health Research Agency, she was ordered to make corrections in the ethics statements of 11 different papers. Her 2017 study of the Lightning Process, which in my view constitutes research misconduct and arguably worse, now carries a 3,000-word correction and a 1,000-word editor’s note offering tortured explanations for why Professor Crawley and her colleagues were allowed to publish the exact same unreliable findings in the revised version of the paper.
Yet these and other black marks on Professor Crawley’s record, such as accusing me publicly of “libellous blogging” and then refusing to explain herself, haven’t prevented her from continuing to rake in public monies for her misguided experimentation—uh, “research”–on vulnerable children. That her work still commands institutional support is a disturbing commentary on the broken ethical compass that apparently guides decision-making at Bristol, UK funding agencies, and the major journals that have published her output..........
