chalder

Trial By Error: My Letter to Psych Medicine About Professor Chalder’s Flawed Systematic Review

9 September 2022 by David Tuller 7 Comments

By David Tuller, DrPH

Earlier this week, I wrote about the bogus systematic review of treatment trials for “chronic fatigue syndrome” published this month by Professor Trudie Chalder in Psychological Medicine. In many respects, as I noted, this journal functions a an in-house marketing or public relations organ for members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades, of which Professor Chalder is a charter member. (Professors Michael Sharpe and Simon Wessely are on the Psychological Medicine editorial board. Enough said.)

In addition to formally submitting the article through the journal’s online portal, I also posted it on a pre-print server and sent it directly to the two co-editors of the journal. Here it is.

Trial By Error: Another CBT/GET Marketing Document Masquerading as Research from Professor Chalder

7 September 2022 by David Tuller 5 Comments

By David Tuller, DrPH

It’s another month, and here’s another worthless paper from Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s factually and statistically challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). In her desperate effort to prove that the treatment paradigm for ME/CFS combining CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) is evidence-based, she has now published a paper called “A systematic review of randomized controlled trials evaluating prognosis following treatment for adults with chronic fatigue syndrome.”

Trial By Error: Professor Chalder Reports CBT Does Not Work for Post-Stroke Fatigue, Calls for More Research

26 July 2022 by David Tuller

By David Tuller, DrPH

Calling out a Trudie Chalder paper is way too easy. It’s also old hat for Virology Blog—going back to 2015 and my initial investigation into the now-discredited PACE trial, of which she was one of three lead investigators. She is a professor of “cognitive behavioural psychotherapy” at King’s College London, so she researches the impact of CBT on whatever illness is at hand. That’s all Professor Chalder does; she’s a one-trick pony.

Trial By Error: PACE Team Stages a Comeback Tour

11 April 2022 by David Tuller

By David Tuller, DrPH

*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

Professors Peter White, Trudie Chalder and Michael Sharpe seem to have embarked on what could be called the PACE Rehabilitation Tour.

This is an apparent effort to salvage their reputations and save professional face now that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has officially rescinded its previous recommendations for graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavior therapy as treatments for what the agency currently calls ME/CFS. It is also an effort by these professors to gain a foothold in the long Covid marketplace. They hope their crumbling GET/CBT treatment paradigm for ME/CFS can revive its fortunes in a post-coronavirus world.

Trial By Error: Awaiting Response on Chalder Paper; Australian GPs Still Promoting GET and Citing PACE

4 January 2022 by David Tuller

By David Tuller, DrPH

Last month, the journal Occupational Medicine published an innumerate article from Professor Trudie Chalder and several colleagues at Kingâ€™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 authorsâ€™ 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.)

Trial By Error: An Exchange of Letters Concerning Professor Chalder’s Latest Disaster of a Paper

22 December 2021 by David Tuller

By David Tuller, DrPH

Last week, Brian Hughes and I sent a letter to Occupational Medicine, which recently published yet another of Professor Trudie Chalderâ€™s awful papers. Among other problems, Professor Chalder and her four co-authors completely misstated their own findings in the text of the paper. We called for retraction of the paper.

In the past, I have preferred to send such letters directly to a journalâ€™s editor or editorsâ€”as a way of creating more attention and perhaps triggering some action. My interest has been more in prompting editors to address major issues than in having my letters officially published. In this case, Occupational Medicineâ€™s masthead does not include e-mails for specific editors, so we sent our letter to the journal through the formal submissions process. We also posted it on a pre-print server.