By David Tuller, DrPH
Last month, the journal Occupational Medicine published an innumerate article from Professor Trudie Chalder and several colleagues at King’s College London, called “Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status: a retrospective longitudinal study.” Professor Brian Hughes, a psychologist at National University of Ireland, Galway, and I alerted the journal of some disqualifying issues with the paper, including the authors’ jaw-dropping failure to accurately describe their own statistical findings. (They completely mangled the percentages related to the core findings. When I first read the paper, I reviewed the text and tables again and again to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding how badly they’d screwed up.)