Rebuttal

Dear IARTP 2020 ‘Future of Medicine’ panel,

The following are my team’s responses and rebuttals to the reviews of our recently submitted paper to your conference. We hope you find them elucidating and that we have sufficiently dealt with, or discounted, any of their issues.

Reviewer 2 has suggested that the pink paint used to colour our test tubes should be replaced with brown paint due to the findings of Somesuch (2012). Further, the specific shade of brown paint needed (#964B00) can be easily purchased through BuyMyShit.io which the reviewer promises they have no affiliation to. We have accepted their recommendations and repainted the test-tubes brown as it does appear that the previous transparent pink colouring may have had a positive effect on the mental state of our younger (10-18) patient group and therefore may taint our results. The experiment has been repeated with a small sub-set of each patient group at truly staggering cost. We have compared these smaller sub-samples against the original findings and can state with confidence that no statistically significant difference exists between the pink/brown groups meaning that our original results can be trusted and that this possible external factor can be discounted. The participants have complained that the new test-tubes make the solution appear to be watered down feces and have requested we return to the pink colouring that made the test-tubes appear to contain ‘magic fairy juice.’ We have not done so.

Reviewer 3 has suggested that the current ANOVA testing method should be abandoned. They have supplied 6 articles which go to great lengths describing just how incredibly useless ANOVA is as a method of statistical analysis. However, they do not suggest that we have engaged in p-hacking, we are grateful for their infinitesimal restraint. From the comments made by reviewer 3 we were faced with the decision to either a) expand on our 3 page introduction by including 18 new references only tangentially related to the topic under discussion (all of which are authored by the same 3 scientists and are each generally lacking any citations but we are sure this has nothing to do with the suggestion) or b) an extension of the results section. Taking our current standardized analysis, which has been accepted in the field for close to a century, and incorporating a new method named after those same 3 scientists that has been widely decried by the community as being so conservative as to being able to deny the existence of God if He were to appear in front of our very eyes.

Reviewer 1 has recommended that the panel accept our paper. We thank reviewer 1 for their comments on how they found the paper an interesting read. We especially appreciate the acknowledgement that this is indeed an under-researched and under-reported area of interest. That the young participants (10-12) have been searching for someone to help them and doctors that will listen to their symptoms and not immediately ascribe their reported issues to puberty. We felt gratitude at their emphasis surrounding the point that there are repeated examples where specific patient groups have been ignored in the past only for a new sub-set of a disease to later be discovered that was completely preventable or curable and could have spared thousands of patients much pain and suffering. We have added the suggested citations to the introduction to increase the evidence provided regarding this point.

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Dear IARTP 2021 ‘New Discoveries in Medical Diseases’ panel,

We, once again, have provided response and rebuttal to the reviews provided by your esteemed reviewers. We would like to note that almost none of the same criticisms as were levelled last year have been repeated this year. This is despite us having made no substantial changes to the paper.  We recognise that different reviewers review papers each year but it is interesting, would you not agree, that the issues from last year are not seen this year. Further, as is stated in the following but we wished to make painfully clear here, the issues found by reviewers 1 and 2 are not with our science, method, or conclusions but with our wording. They do not state that any of our wordings are wrong, merely uncomfortable, we do not believe that discomfort is sufficient reason to deny our work for publication again.

Reviewers 2 and 3 have both suggested that the article would be much improved if we removed all references to oversight, failings, delays, mistakes, willful ignorance and possible malpractice. We took particular note of the issue they alluded to: that by not doing this it was unlikely that this work would be published and therefore any attempt to address the issues detailed in the article would be inevitably pushed further down the road. Therefore, if we do not accept this recommendation, it really is as if we were now causing the mistreatment and misdiagnosis of the patients ourselves. We would like to thank both reviewers for their enlightening elucidational explanation of the philosophy of the ends justifying the means. We thank them for their forthright and frank examination of the world that we live in as adults and not, as indeed they seem to believe we misunderstand, as children. Further, they both are in lock-step agreement that the introduction paragraph detailing the many examples of similar issues throughout history is too grandiose. We find this surprising. We state that: “it is true that the medical field has struggled to correct its mistakes before due to overarching accepted dogma suppressing investigation into diseases found only in specific sub-sets of the population” followed by 18 separate citations covering mistakes made over a period of 200 years. We struggle to find anything ‘grandiose’ in this statement of absolute historical fact.

We have responded to both reviewer 2 and 3 by fixing the typos they so kindly point out in paragraphs 16 and 18.

Reviewer 1 suggested that the use of AI may improve our work. This is the only comment they have made and therefore we are struggling to understand why their recommendation is that of ‘strong reject’. In an attempt to not go insane, we have treated this as an accidental misclick and can only assume they thought they had instead selected ‘strong accept’. We have indeed investigated using one of the multiple AI tools available to researchers. However, as each and every single one of those tools confidently, and somewhat blithely, informed us that it would ‘aquire’ any data fed through it for future training purposes, and this would be in direct conflict with our data gathering agreement with each individual participant we therefore could not make use of AI.

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Dear IARTP 2023 ‘Infectious Diseases in the preteen/teen Age Groups’ panel,

All three reviewers have selected strong accept. No improvements or adjustments were suggested. We dare the panel to reject us. We are not going to stop. We are not going to soften our words for the sensibilities of those used to being spoken to kindly. The words of our patients will be heard.