These ties between a prestige institution like KCL and the unproven LP are not surprising. Professors Sir Simon Wessely and Trudie Chalder, both among KCL’s leading lights, have spent years–decades, really–spouting unproven claims about the powers of CBT and GET to cure patients with what they have preferred to call CFS. These two experienced investigators recently collaborated on yet another problematic and deceptive study. As
Virology Blog reported earlier this month, this study made causal inferences about the effectiveness of CBT while noting that the lack of a control group made it impossible to make causal inferences about the effectiveness of CBT. Among other methodological problems.
Professor Chalder was also part of a team that studied CBT to treat so-called dissociative seizures—that is, seizures with no identified organic cause. The intervention had null results for its primary outcome of seizure reduction at 12 months. The
KCL press release touted the study as a success based on secondary outcomes of questionable meaning and did not mention that the primary outcome failed. In the same press release, Professor Chalder hailed the intervention’s “effectiveness”—a misrepresentation of the findings.
I could go on, but I won’t. The point is that an affiliation with KCL is no guarantee of academic rigor or intellectual integrity. At least in the domain of psycho-behavioral research on complex illnesses, the KCL brand seems more likely to signify poor methodology, ethical lapses, and willful misinterpretation of unimpressive data. UC Berkeley epidemiology students who turned in work of such low caliber would get smacked down pretty quickly.
