Draft Clinical Practice Guidelines
Dr Mark Donohoe
February 1998
• Preamble •
Table of Contents
• Preamble •
Table of Contents
Preamble
The RACGP Draft Clinical Practice Guidelines on chronic fatigue syndrome have proven to be a most controversial subject since late in 1997, when the document was released for public comment, and for further input by stakeholders and the public.
This site addresses the document. I admit to holding strong negative views of the document, and that these views were reached after reading the document many times over. My major areas of concern are:
- origins and self selecting nature of the committee;
- lack of terms of reference;
- lack of inclusiveness and transparency of the committee;
- alterations of the NH&MRC quality of evidence (QER) ratings; and
- selective literature quotation.
In addition, it is my view that:
- the literature quoted has been intentionally selected to support the prior views of certain committee members;
- sections of the relevant scientific literature have been excluded on the basis that it did not support the committee's views;
- the recommendations are unsupported by the scientific literature; and
- the committee has arbitrarily altered the evidence ratings to allow such recommendations to be made.
In short, it is my view (and this is shared by a number of my medical colleagues) that the document represents at the best incompetence, and at worst scientific misconduct and possible fraud on the part of the committee.
If you do not already have a copy, please download and print the The RACP Draft Clinical Practice Guidelines, authored by Loblay et al. Even though the deadline is passed, I would urge anyone with views on this document to make their views known to the Royal Australian College of Physicians, and to the architects of the report.
Table of Contents 1. Dr Donohoe's critique broken into sections
1.1 Overview1.2 Abbreviations and conventions
1.7 Specific Analysis of sections (large file)
2. Donohoe Critique - Full Document (a single HTML file of ~200K)
3. Acrobat file downloads (Acrobat [.pdf] files for downloading)
4. Links (other links of interest related to the DCPGs)
