Do the Editors at BMJ Archives of Disease in Childhood Care about Conflicts of Interest?
Fate has compelled be to pay attention to medical studies and journal articles on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). I am usually most interested in an article's abstract, describing the results, as I am not easily able to closely follow the medical details. Sometimes, however, there are ethics issues regarding the studies themselves, which are squarely in my wheelhouse. So it was with a recent study, in the British journal
Archives of Disease in Childhood, of the so-called “Lightning Process,” which seemed to validate the three-day training process – which uses “neuro-linguistic programming,” life coaching, and “emotional self-regulation” – as a potentially effective treatment for ME/CFS in children.
Biomedical research ethics are not the same as legal ethics, but there are areas of overlap, including conflicts of interest. A central rule in both fields should be that individuals cannot be relied upon to assess their own objectivity. Instead, we have external standards for judges, lawyers, and, one would have thought, medical researchers. Regrettably, the editors of Archives of Disease in Childhood have allowed the authors of the Lightning Process study to vouch for their own credibility, in circumstances where their credibility should have been reasonably in doubt.
The invaluable David Tuller, of the University of California, Berkeley, reviewed the Lightening Process study and
discovered several glaring problems. Most significantly, ............................
