By David Tuller, DrPH
Today I received an e-mail from Professor Roger Jones, editor of British Journal of General Practice. I’ve been nudging him to correct a false statement in a 2017 editorial about the cost of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” to the UK National Health Service. The false statement involved a misquotation of a key statistic from a seminal 2010 paper. Professor Jones had promised to make the correction two weeks ago, so I sent him a reminder on Sunday.
He has now let me know that the correction is in process even though it is not yet visible to readers of the website. Here’s what he wrote:
“Don’t worry, this is all in hand. It takes a while because it’s not a simple case of updating a webpage; we rely on third parties to update the xml and reprocess the article, and Pubmed etc will only make the correction once the print notice has been published. The print notice will appear in the July BJGP, and the online correction will be completed before the end of this month.”
I have spent a lot of time pressuring people to correct their mistakes. I have sometimes used blunt language in advancing my arguments. Professor Jones is doing the right thing here, and I want to thank him for that. I doubt the correction will include the full scope of what I suggested, including an in-depth explanation for how this all happened and why the lead author, Professor Carolyn Chew-Graham, did not respond to an e-mail I sent her in January pointing out the error. Nonetheless, anyone reading the article in future will read a version that accurately cites Bermingham et al, the 2010 study that sought to calculate the costs of MUS.
Making corrections when needed is part of the job description of being an editor. Yet as I have come to learn, some editors at major UK journals do not appear to take that part of the job description seriously when it comes to these domains of inquiry. I very much appreciate that Professor Jones is choosing to act in this case. As I try to persuade other editors and authors to correct similar misquotations of the same 2010 article, it will be helpful to be able to point to Professor Jones’ positive example.
In contrast to the resolution of this matter with BJGP, the situation with the Lightning Process paper continues to defy all reason. The failure of the relevant research and editorial oversight systems to address the problems in the conduct and reporting of the study, published in 2017 in the BMJ journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, represents a breach of the professional and ethical obligations of all involved. (That’s not even addressing the decision to conduct the study in the first place.)
In this Bristol University study, an experienced team of investigators recruited more than half of the participants before trial registration, swapped outcomes based on the early results, and then wrote up the paper as if it were a prospective trial with pre-selected outcome measures. In doing all this, the investigators violated core methodological principles of scientific research. By providing a high-profile showcase for this disastrous piece of work, BMJ has granted legitimacy to an intervention designed by a Tarot healer and aura expert. To date, the journal and the university have refused to acknowledge the obvious: the reported findings cannot be taken at face value.
This study must be retracted before the BMJ and Bristol seals of approval encourage even more parents to enroll their kids in the Lightning Process. It’s a shame that the stewards of these respected institutions are choosing to tarnish their brands in this manner.
Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, video games, radio, game-play, unstructured recreation, and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and other visual arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such as modern art, refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual.
Apparently scientific research for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis falls under abstract creativity.
Nice to see a clean-up underway (apparently), but it should include those things that David has asked for, so that GPs are made aware of what happened here and how the BJGP came to mislead them so badly on a major health issue that negatively impacts so many of their patients.
Waiting to hear if they are going to correct it properly, or with as little as they can get away with. Color me a bit skeptical. Thirty years of my life as a physicist destroyed by the lack of proper research and funding has made me quite cynical.
I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the work that you do, Mr. Tuller. Raising a child with ME/CFS has been challenging when doctors believe a daily jog around the block and an attitude adjustment will cure a major disease. Lately, I, myself, have been working to reverse metabolic syndrome. In the process, I discovered that it has resulted from my following government’s bad nutritional advice over a lifetime, eating meals low in fat and high in carbs in government schools, and following the “food pyramid” from the USDA which was based on “scientific” information on diet and nutrition arising from bad science or a lack of scientific inquiry, including some dishonest practices in Ancel Keyes’s Seven Countries study (he started with 22 and cherry picked) like you described above. When medical researchers cut corners and oversight fails, it is not just a political wrestling match, and not just careers and money are at stake. PEOPLE DIE.