Another Anti-Science Campaigner Takes Aim at NICE
The anti-science zealots do not give up easily. Now Live Landmark, the Norwegian Lightning Process practitioner, has written
an opinion piece blasting the new evidence-based guidelines for ME/CFS from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). I assume she is not just upset that the document bars standard interventions like graded exercise therapy (GET) and a form of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) but that it also specifically bars the Lightning Process (LP), her personal specialty.
Landmark and her comrades in the GET/CBT/LP ideological brigades have been humiliated publicly by NICE, so it is understandable that they are throwing tantrums–even one as divorced from reality as this article. Landmark’s arguments can’t be taken seriously–except perhaps by those whose core financial and reputational interests are threatened by NICE’s in-depth analysis of the deficiencies of the evidence.
Here’s what Landmark opines: “Unfortunately, the recommendations made in the new NICE guidelines for chronic fatigue were not based on the published research. This means that the Norwegian Directorate of Health can be confident in ignoring their suggestions.”
The NICE decisions were based on the fact that the evidence in support of the interventions was found to be of poor quality. Landmark might not agree with that assessment and she might prefer her own country’s health authorities to dismiss it as unwarranted. But she can’t rewrite what happened, nor should the Norwegian Directorate of Health pay attention to her rant. The recommendations against CBT, GET and LP were based on the dramatic shortcomings of the research, which NICE outlined in voluminous detail.
Psychologist Brian Hughes, a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, dismantles much of Landmark’s argument in
this twitter thread........
