Dr David Tuller: Professor Edwards’ Letter to BMJ on the Cochrane Mess

Countrygirl

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I hear certain prominent members of the BPS cabal have been blocking Cochrane's review of the evidence for GET.
I heard only yesterday that an insurance company is demanding that one of their clients with ME completes a course of GET before they will consider her claim.


https://virology.ws/2025/02/03/tria...hllr01BEtvDDimI6jQ_aem_uu1HnUoR9qPsfmTV8gLA0A

Trial By Error: Professor Edwards’ Letter to BMJ on the Cochrane Mess​

2 Comments / By David Tuller / 3 February 2025
By David Tuller, DrPH

The Cochrane mess, which I wrote about the other day, is threatening to take on a life of its own. Perhaps Cochrane thinks the fuss over the big Christmas “fuck you” it delivered to members of the ME/CFS community will blow over quickly. That could happen, I suppose, but I suspect this issue will continue to bedevil Cochrane unless it takes responsibility for the harm it has inflicted on patients and then moves to fix the damage.
To recap: In 2019, Cochrane published a sub-par review of exercise therapy for ME/CFS (or what it has called CFS). The review recommended exercise therapy, albeit with some qualifications. At the time, the organization acknowledged deficiencies in the review, which was based on a protocol written in the early 2000s. Cochrane promised a full-scale update, starting with a new protocol, and designated a writing team and an independent advisory group (IAG) of stakeholders. In mid-December, it curtly announced the project was dead and slapped a 2024 date on the old review.

In late January, Hilda Bastian, the longtime Cochrane insider tapped to head the IAG, posted a scathing blog taking the organization to task. Two prominent publications—Retraction Watch and The BMJ—covered the brouhaha, ensuring that news of Cochrane’s problematic actions would break out beyond the narrow confines of the ME/CFS community. Given the renewed attention to the issue, an online petition calling for retraction of the 2019 review has now attracted more than 15,000 signers.
Meanwhile, a German reporting cooperative, RiffReporter, published an account by journalist Martin Rücker that contained some new details about how and when the organization made the choice to abandon the project. According to Rücker, the decision, made at a Cochrane board gathering in September, was in part a reaction to the serious backlash the group received for its questionable handling of a 2023 review of whether masks were effective against viral illnesses. More information about how things went down will undoubtedly emerge as the situation continues to spin out of Cochrane’s control, which seems likely. In seeking to avoid more unwanted attention, the organization’s leaders seem to have created a new scandal for themselves.

Jonathan Edwards, an emeritus professor of medicine at University College London and a longtime advocate for patients with ME/CFS, sent a letter to The BMJ in response to its article. So far, The BMJ has not published it, so I have posted it here.
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“Advocates of the intervention launched a full-on bid to try to stop the project. “
Dear Editor,

Your 27th January News article by Jacqui Wise (2025) gives a fair account of the disgraceful behaviour at Cochrane over the abandonment of the planned rewriting of the poor-quality Systematic Review on Exercise Therapy for ME/CFS. ...........................
 
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