Trial By Error: My Six-Month Review
22 JANUARY 2019
By David Tuller, DrPH
So it’s time again to review my work and figure out what I’ve been doing. My crowdfunding from last April has been covering my half-time position at Berkeley since July 1, so December 31 marks the end of the first six months. The Berkeley fiscal year ends June 30th, so I will need to decide soon if I am going to crowdfund again this spring and continue this project for another year.
I posted
42 times from July 1st through December 31st. A third of these posts–14, if I counted correctly–involved the terrible pediatric studies coming out of the University of Bristol. The lead investigator of the Bristol group, of course, is the former vice chair of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative. Many members of the CMRC now appear to have recognized that the Bristol work is sub-par and does not warrant much consideration.
Many of these 14 posts concerned either the Lightning Process study or the school absence study, both of which are rife with methodological and ethical missteps and need to be retracted. I also reported
how Bristol was advertising its FITNET-NHS trialby essentially promising that two-thirds of those who got the treatment would recover—a great way to bias the results. And I exposed how the Bristol team decided to cite
the same research ethics committee letter to exempt at least 11 studies from ethical review—some of them clearly under false pretenses. Five of those studies
were published in BMJ journals, yet BMJ has stonewalled rather than taking any corrective action.
