“One of the great puzzles of the psychogenic literature,” writes Dr. Martin Pall, a researcher on functional somatic syndromes, “is how do so many bad papers get published?” Calling the publication of research with such shoddy scientific standards “by far the largest failure of the peer-review system that I am aware of,” he notes, “I cannot help wondering whether it is based on the fact that most victims of these illnesses are women. There is a long history of sex discrimination in medicine, and while I would like to think we are more enlightened in the twenty-first century, this pattern
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