CBT/GET - in their own words.

It is not needed to go to third parties analysis to find the glaring errors. Quoting something I wrote for other purposes.

The PACE trial was the largest trial into CBT/GET/APT as a proposed treatment for CFS/ME.
The authors of this trial later released Adaptive pacing, cognitive behaviour therapy, graded exercise, and specialist medical care for chronic fatigue syndrome: a cost-effectiveness analysis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411573/

I disagree with much in the paper as misleadingly positive, however looking at the text reveals several damning parts.

In the section Welfare Benefits and Other Financial Payments

“Receipt of benefits due to illness or disability increased slightly from baseline to follow-up … “

Looking at table 4. In no arm of the trial including control, were less patients on income replacement benefits, sickness benefits, or claiming income protection insurance after the trial.

Summing the rows, receiving payments other than work:

APT CBT GET SMC

Before 50 48 53 53

After 68 63 72 60

Worse% 18 15 19 7


This is not a curative treatment The number of people who are not in work and receiving benefits of some form after one of the treatments was 8-12% higher in any of the treatment arms than in the control arm.


In 2017, reviewing treatment efficacy following the introduction of the current NICE guidelines, members of the pace team wrote in Specialist treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome/ME: a cohort study among adult patients in England

https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-017-2437-3


Table 6 ‘Table 6 Change in activities and health across CFS/ME specialist services at 2- to 5-year follow-up’ reveals that 2-5 years after treatment in no category that involves going out of the house, is the number of patients improving outweighed by those that got worse. Only 5.7% of patients answer ‘I no longer believe I have CFS/ME’.