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Crawley & O'Dowd - Early Intervention In Fatigue: A Feasibility Study

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
Keith Geraghty posted a reference to the above on twitter. It is somewhat old, and has not een published.


http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN7264589...8&page=1&pageSize=100&searchType=basic-search
DDjIhHOW0AE18qD.jpg

https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finder-archive/contract/377424/
From the contract document.
IT IS AGREED THAT:

1. The Contractor will undertake a research project entitled Early Intervention In Fatigue: A Feasibility Study in accordance with the work specified in Section 3, being project application PB-PG-1010-23253, dated 25 January 2011 as amended by correspondence dated 18 October 2011 “the Project”.
...
17.7 The Contractor shall provide within 14 days of the Completion Date a draft paper suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed journal

Of course, remains unpublished.
I have not the energy to read the contract document in full at this time, it seems to require a draft paper be prepared. I wonder if that was, and if it was simply not published.
FOIA might be interesting to get that paper.
There can be little argument that a paper produced for publication (but not published) 6 years on is excluded by any of the FOIA exemptions.
 

Ysabelle-S

Highly Vexatious
Messages
524
Well, since I didn't have any fatigue in the first year or so, I would not have been picked up, yet I did get post viral syndrome on a medical certificate within weeks. I already had the neuro, cognitive, eye sight, immune and other problems by then. I don't recall having sleep problems though.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902

lilpink

Senior Member
Messages
988
Location
UK
I apparently missed:

I don't know what the above contract might imply about the copyright status of the above report, and how widely it may be shared.

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ - perhaps the original authors could take advantage of the various open public preprint archives to share the results of their work, if they are having difficulty finding publication.

It shouldn't be possible to hide null results simply by not publishing them. All research should be published in one way or another.
 

Stewart

Senior Member
Messages
291
It shouldn't be possible to hide null results simply by not publishing them. All research should be published in one way or another.

...especially when it's funded by taxpayers.

PACE received £5 million of public money - via the MRC, DoH, DWP and the NHS Scotland CSO (apologies for the acronym onslaught...) but the public is not allowed to see the data (which we now know to be because the data disproves the published results and undermines the rationale for administering CBT and GET in the process).

The DoH then gave Esther Crawley nearly £250,000 of public money to conduct this study - the results of which apparently disprove the effectiveness of CBT and GET again - but she never publishes, so the evidence that her theories are complete bunkum never makes it into the public domain. Another quarter of a million of public funds spent and absolutely nothing to show for it.

Not to worry though - because the NIHR has now given EC another million pounds to carry out the FITNET-NHS trial - building on work done in Denmark, which was shown to have no long-term effect on the health of the participants. Oh yeah, and FITNET is another non-blinded study focussing mainly on subjective outcomes - meaning that investigator bias is pretty much guaranteed to creep in. She's already done a round of media interviews, appealing for trial participants by claiming that the treatment is very effective - so she's primed participants to expect positive results even before treatment has started. There's your bias right there - her media campaign ensured that the FITNET results will be unreliable garbage before a single patient was treated. How's that for efficiency?

I wonder how much quality research £6.25 million would buy? I think it would fund Ron Davis' team for well over a year. Instead the British Government keeps on giving it to these charlatans, who piss it up the wall with no discernable benefit to anyone but themselves.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
I wonder how much quality research £6.25 million would buy? I think it would fund Ron Davis' team for well over a year. Instead the British Government keeps on giving it to these charlatans, who piss it up the wall with no discernable benefit to anyone but themselves.

It's not £6.25, by a long way.
Assuming for no particular reason that there are 20 secondary care clinics in the UK, with 6 clinicians in each, with a total cost of 300K/year, all mostly deliverying illness denying CBT/GET, for around 10 years now, that is more like £62 million than £62.5.

This is even before the costs of symptom exacerbation, either long-term or short term.
It could probably reasonably be argued that the research has directly and indirectly lead in the UK that dwarf the above figure of 62 million.

edit:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22899647
Seems to say there were, in 2010, 49 CFS/ME clinical teams in England. Presumably a handful in Scotland, wales, and NI too.

We need an inarticulate screaming emote.
 
Last edited:

Sean

Senior Member
Messages
7,378
The DoH then gave Esther Crawley nearly £250,000 of public money to conduct this study - the results of which apparently disprove the effectiveness of CBT and GET again - but she never publishes, so the evidence that her theories are complete bunkum never makes it into the public domain. Another quarter of a million of public funds spent and absolutely nothing to show for it.
How is this anything less than serious fraud, financial and scientific?

Withholding results should be one of the greatest sins in science, regardless of who ran or funded the study. Equivalent to straight faking of data.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
How is this anything less than serious fraud, financial and scientific?
Withholding results should be one of the greatest sins in science, regardless of who ran or funded the study. Equivalent to straight faking of data.

The contract (on a quick glance) does not actually require publication.
It requires preparation of a draft suitable for publication.
The contracting body is the only one that can sue for non-performance, in general.

The DOH has the right to publish themselves, if it has not occurred in one year.
(14.4).

It may be intellectually dishonest, but if the people funding the research choose not to require it to be published, nothing in their contract actually says they must publish, or submit it to a journal.

I would be surprised if it was not agreed by the DOH and the team in question not to publish.

A full copy of the correspondence around this would be interesting, especially if it shone light on any rationale not to publish.