A general thread on the PACE trial!

[Jonathan Edwards]

Seems more of an emotional response from him.

Edit: I see I am a bit late with that one.

I see a little more of the landscape.

 

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

Some tweets are so absurdly stupid it's hard to believe it's not an act.

I'm pretty confident that this is not an act.

60.000 followers are seeing his tweets in which he compares ME/CFS to the time he broke his ankle or where he calls legitime concerns about GET being harmful, 'whining'.

I think he just snapped when he saw MPs in parliament speak up against the PACE trial.

 

[ukxmrv]

An ill-judged attempt to help his friend out. The real "whiners" are behind the scenes complaining about attacks on PACE.

Nice loyalty, but leaves him open to reputational damage by showing that he cannot understand research processes and also strikes out for a friend in an emotional way against disabled people. Bad combination.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I'm off to bed but the poor fellow really is revealing his stupidity.

He wants statistically significant evidence of harm.
So you need 95% confidence of harm before you take notice?

 

[Hoopoe]

I take my earlier statement back. He seems to be trying to advocate for the science, presumably that means PACE.

 

[Adrian]

I am puzzled as to why this chap is tweeting now. Is this the response to the HoP debate that so far has been curiously missing?

I'm not sure where the first tweet came from but I suspect he was put up to defending PACE. Its strange how otherwise respectable academics occasionally appear out of nowhere to embarrass themselves by defending PACE.

 

[Adrian]

Nice loyalty, but leaves him open to reputational damage by showing that he cannot understand research processes and also strikes out for a friend in an emotional way against disabled people. Bad combination.

Or reputational damage by showing he is prepared to defend friends without actually reading the thing he is defending.

 

[NelliePledge]

Maybe Mike Godwin would reach out to him to let him know that U.K. BPS lot have history of trying to get their old mates to back them publicly on Twitter. And if he’s been put up to it basically DB is just being ‘mugged off’. It seems unlikely DB just triggered all this off his own bat but if he did he really is a plank. Reputation damage from being a mug or a plank.

 

[Sean]

Or reputational damage by showing he is prepared to defend friends without actually reading the thing he is defending.

Come on down, Lord Winston.

 

[Esther12]

Looks like he's a close friend of White's who doesn't know much about medical research so I don't think it's worth putting effort in to convincing him his old friend is a quack.

 

[Barry]

I'm off to bed but the poor fellow really is revealing his stupidity.

He wants statistically significant evidence of harm.
So you need 95% confidence of harm before you take notice?

Combined with the fact there is negligible evidence of real benefit. I think tablets whose only effect were a strong possibility they caused deterioration of the very condition they were being taken for, would not be prescribed.

 

[Barry]

I'm not sure where the first tweet came from but I suspect he was put up to defending PACE. Its strange how otherwise respectable academics occasionally appear out of nowhere to embarrass themselves by defending PACE.

May well be a case of PACE'ites finding others daft enough to do their dirty work for them. I think they may be panicking.

 

[Adrian]

Looks like he's a close friend of White's who doesn't know much about medical research so I don't think it's worth putting effort in to convincing him his old friend is a quack.

He has blocked me now. I wasn't impressed by the quality of his reasoning. His main argument seemed to be that what if PACE is right by criticising it we are blocking a treatment with a chance. But he failed to consider the costs of having ineffective treatments both on the likely development of other treatments and was relying on Cochrane's dodgy claim that GET is safe.

I did think it was interesting he was only backing GET and not CBT so clearly a friend of White. I suspect he was finding it hard to believe that his friend had done such poor work and would knowingly push something that harmed patients. Which I think can be hard. I suspect the insulting language he was using reflects the way White describes ME patients.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

It is interesting that we have heard nothing from Peter White himself for at least a year, maybe more. I had assumed that he had accepted that he was not going to be able to counter the criticism in the JHP volume. If I were he and genuinely thought I had been unfairly criticised I would have made private contact with critics to try to put them right. Wessely did that to me early on but not since I pointed out that his arguments were ramshackle.

Michael Sharpe continued to make noise until quite recently but even he seems to have given up. It looks to me as if Blanchflower has misjudged the mood. I guess you would need to be a loud-mouthed clown to have 60,000 Twitter followers. The aping of the rudeness of White and Sharpe seems particularly naive. Maybe he has concerns about a knock-on effect on his own area of publication if the UK Parliament decides that his colleagues work is not fit for purpose.

 

[Trish]

It is interesting that we have heard nothing from Peter White himself for at least a year, maybe more.

I thought he had retired.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I thought he had retired.

Yes, but I have retired too. I still defend my work in the courts of law when the opportunity arises.

 

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

we have heard nothing from Peter White himself for at least a year,

There was this case where he defended Bleijenberg/Knoop against criticism by Twisk and Corsius. Thought that was remarkable because the paper and critique had nothing to do with GET. This was only a month ago, see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...B85E1E18395A44E4535281167FD413#fndtn-comments

 

[ukxmrv]

He has blocked me now. I wasn't impressed by the quality of his reasoning. His main argument seemed to be that what if PACE is right by criticising it we are blocking a treatment with a chance. But he failed to consider the costs of having ineffective treatments both on the likely development of other treatments and was relying on Cochrane's dodgy claim that GET is safe.

I did think it was interesting he was only backing GET and not CBT so clearly a friend of White. I suspect he was finding it hard to believe that his friend had done such poor work and would knowingly push something that harmed patients. Which I think can be hard. I suspect the insulting language he was using reflects the way White describes ME patients.

We can only guess at his motivation and reasoning. There is a possibility that he simply didn't know how bad PACE was and all the critiques of the past few years.

He may have been stuck in the old rhetoric. Patients are irrational and attacking science. There are no harms just "whiners" trying to stop people from the only effective treatment available.

He may not know about the international opposition to PACE that has grown up in the past years. It was safe to bully and attack patients then. We could be called "whiners" safely and with no criticism from peers and claim that we were stopping something effective - after all we were the people who sent death threats so we must be wrong.

Science must be defended from us and he was on his white horse and nobly doing this. Science belongs to him.

From his tweets it seems to be a shock to see how the argument has moved once since PACE was published. PACE is doomed, it's dead in the water and anyone defending it without thinking through the implications risks ridicule now.

He'll have to find another vulnerable group to abuse now in the guise of defending science.

 

[Sly Saint]

There was this case where he defended Bleijenberg/Knoop against criticism by Twisk and Corsius. Thought that was remarkable because the paper and critique had nothing to do with GET. This was only a month ago, see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...B85E1E18395A44E4535281167FD413#fndtn-comments

well he may be 'retired' but
"Conflict of interest: PW reports funding from the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit programme during the conduct of this study; is a member of the Independent Medical Experts Group (a non-departmental public body, which advises the UK Ministry of Defence regarding the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme); has provided unpaid advice to the UK Department for Work and Pensions regarding mental health issues; and does paid consultancy for a re-insurance company."

 

[JohnTheJack]

It is interesting that we have heard nothing from Peter White himself for at least a year, maybe more. I had assumed that he had accepted that he was not going to be able to counter the criticism in the JHP volume. If I were he and genuinely thought I had been unfairly criticised I would have made private contact with critics to try to put them right. Wessely did that to me early on but not since I pointed out that his arguments were ramshackle.

Michael Sharpe continued to make noise until quite recently but even he seems to have given up. It looks to me as if Blanchflower has misjudged the mood. I guess you would need to be a loud-mouthed clown to have 60,000 Twitter followers. The aping of the rudeness of White and Sharpe seems particularly naive. Maybe he has concerns about a knock-on effect on his own area of publication if the UK Parliament decides that his colleagues work is not fit for purpose.

I seem to recall White had health problems (cancer?) which may explain why he has been relatively quiet.