Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

Jonathan Edwards said:
So when Wessely comes up with this strange apparently unsubstantiated statement that CBT on its own is no good but it works with occupational... he is not meaning occupational therapy but a visit to an 'employment practitioner'?

Maybe he is happy to give ground on PACE right left and centre because now the 'evidence base' is IAPT which is going swimmingly. Apart from the piece in J Health Psychol this week.
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yes occupational health - people who advise on whether you're fit to return to work, whether you meet the criteria to fall within the Equality Act definition of disabled - working for your employer if you're employed and DWP if on benefits but presented as helping you with return to work

its like an estate agent if you're looking for a house they're not working for you they're working for the seller
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Yes, I don't actually think it crossed Wessely's mind that Godwin would even look at why he was being cited. I think Wessely just thought he would send one of those tweets that 'famous' (sort of) people send to other famous people, to say ' hi, famous person, I just quoted you, you might remember me, I am another 'famous person' (sort of). Famous people of course do not send tweets like this.
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Precisely, Wessely is so accustomed to being feted and lauded by UK establishment it simply would not have crossed his mind that summoning an old pal into the debate would work against him.
 
Whew, this ride is moving pretty fast!

MSEsperanza said:
These underlying assumptions perhaps can be described as the "BPS narrative of ME/CFS" -- a narrative does not have to be logical and can consist of different interwoven sub-narratives that, again, don't have to back each other logically.
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Interesting observation. For sure. The Type A personality + lazy, support-seeking slug comes to mind. Activity-phobic plus boom and bust, too.

I'm sure they'd explain this by saying there are many types of patients though. You can come to the same 'false belief' many ways, or be faking, or whatever explanation suits their purposes at the time.

dave30th said:
Michael Sharpe has now blocked me on twitter.
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:trophy@You have unlocked a new achievement! :trophy@

MSEsperanza said:
Edited: a fundraising campaign for @Keela Too
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I'd be happy to donate. I note that @Keela Too already started doing it but nothing to say we can't set up a quick gofundme to compensate for her efforts.

Keela Too said:
I can always email the docs to someone else to save for the eventuality that the tweets evaporate at a later date.
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Might be good to upload to a Google doc that anyone can access with link, but no one can edit (except you).

Simone said:
Sharpe’s Law:

As an online discussion of PACE trial flaws grows longer, the probability of Michael Sharpe appearing and suggesting that PACE critics should read the paper approaches one.
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:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

adambeyoncelowe said:
'Boom and bust' is the language of blame
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Absolutely agree. The focus is on pathological behavior.

TiredSam said:
Here is a typical German ME sufferer before behavioural intervention:
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:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
 
JaimeS said:
Might be good to upload to a Google doc that anyone can access with link, but no one can edit (except you).
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I emailed them to Adrian, who has put them on here somewhere, and linked them up thread.

I have got as far as post #600 in this thread. I've been putting screen shots of all the tweets in each batch of 100 posts into a document at a time.

Does anyone else want to do a few too? Maybe some one could start at post #1000 and work upwards whilst I catch up?
 
Adrian said:
I would argue that a failure to verify the hypothesis does provide support for disconfirmation but sufficient support to disprove. It suggests that their model is less likely.
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I would agree. In fact, there's been a movement in Psychology recently to dispense with the traditional logic of null hypothesis testing (is the hypothesis supported or not?), and adopt a more Bayesian approach. So without going into boring detail about Bayes, what this means in practice is that instead of testing whether there's enough evidence to favour a particular hypothesis, you can actively compare two different positions.* You decide if the evidence for one position outweighs that for the opposing position, and if so, by how much.

(* It sounds like the same thing as standard null hypothesis testing (NHST). But in practice, there's a difference. Standard NHST allows you to conclude your hypothesis is correct, if the evidence is strong enough (p < .05). But it doesn't ever allow you to conclude with certainty that the null hypothesis is correct. The best you can do is say there's not enough evidence yet to reject it. If you use a Bayesian approach, you could potentially conclude that the null hypothesis is overwhelming favoured by the data, that is, you can safely accept the null hypothesis.)

According to a Bayesian approach, then, the model/idea/narrative underlying CBT and GET is looking less and less likely as the evidence accumulates.

In the "Rethinking" paper, we tried to be really, really careful making this argument. We recognised that according to traditional scientific logic, the PACE trial was not capable of testing the model underlying CBT and GET, only the efficacy of the treatments themselves... BUT that if the model were true, then we would have every reason to see lots of cases of full recovery. And there weren't any really, not where there was objective evidence of a full return to society. So this casts doubt on the model, etc. etc...
 
alex3619 said:
:)

As for narratives, my way of describing this is they put persuasive rhetoric over evidence and reason.
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des-kaisers-neue-kleider-108~_v-standard644_ba5998.jpg
 
JaimeS said:
Might be good to upload to a Google doc that anyone can access with link, but no one can edit (except you).
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The captured tweets are at these links and can be accessed from outside of the forum (unlike attachments). But no one can edit.
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets1.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets2.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets3.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets4.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets5.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets6.pdf
https://www.s4me.info/docs/SharpeTweets7.pdf
 
@Esther12 thanks for the transcript. I never really twigged before that Simon Wesselys missus was also 'in on it'.

One of the key things was for me Tylee saying:
"
Tylee: "Right, now on that idea about alienation, this is something
that we often find in primary care you know we're trying to tell this
person that it's a psychological problem, they're trying to tell us
it's a physical problem, how do we manage that situation?"

to my mind everything about PACE flows from there no matter how they try to disguise it or dress it up.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
moreover, the rationale draws on stuff by Richard Edwards that says that when unfit people exercise they do actually feel awful.
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This shows he has never trained himself, never spoken to people who have AND are sick (e.g. ME, MS, Mitochondriasis etc) or never has been sick himself and trained.

It is an absolutely different feeling to start training as an unfit person and to train with ME. It is so clearly different that I feel it's difficult to view someone not as dumb who keeps on saying unfitness is the underlying problem in ME.
 
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