Rethinking the treatment of CFS — a reanalysis and evaluation of findings from a recent major trial of GET and CBT (2018) Wilshire et al.

[BurnA]

Wow, that Canary Article really hits hard - bringing in the whole Wessely, Aylward, DWP UNUM conflict of interest stuff too. Good for them. Does anyone know what kind of readership it has?

From Wikipedia

During July 2016, The Canary achieved over 7.5 million page views, ranking 97th in readership among British media organisations, slightly higher than The Spectator and The Economist. The site's publishers, Canary Media, rose 47 spots from 126th in June to 79th in July among the top UK publishers.[47] The majority of its site traffic comes from Facebook.[4]

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Very interesting to contrast Chris Ponting's comment with that of Jon Stone on the SMC site. (I actually thought David was being serious and looked for an ASMC site!) Ponting's is the full square common sense response of someone who understands scientific experiments - and how they go wrong. Stone in comparison reveals himself to be a man who has no clue.

Of course Wilshire's interpretation explains the lack of efficacy of 'adaptive pacing' because adaptive pacing was a fake invented treatment in which the therapists had no vested interest. It specifically came with the message that it would not make people better. CBT and GET came with the message that they would make people better. When people are asked to play charades they play charades. No registrar of mine was ever this dumb.

 

[Daisymay]

Stone in comparison reveals himself to be a man who has no clue.

Or a man who knows full well what's what but is prepared to back his colleagues none the less. Also he seems to be heavily into MUS so I guess he doesn't want the whole façade to collapse.

I wonder if he has any links with the health insurance industry?

 

[Barry]

And particular congratulations for managing to get some coverage of this in the UK press. Great work everyone involved!

Yes, that is a real sea change.

 

[Sbag]

Another article https://questioning-answers.blogspo...chronic-fatigue-syndrome-still-put-paces.html

 

[Barry]

Is he trying to be funny? He's not seriously trying to imply that the authors were unduly selective in the choice of data to include in their analyses is he?

It's one of the classic tricks these people resort to all the time - tell only part of the truth, so the statement is deliberately ambiguous, knowing your listener will jump to an interpretation you want them to, and is untrue. It's a very sly form of lying, even though they have not explicitly lied, and will claim they never lied. But it's why in a court of law you have to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"; if you don't then you perjure yourself. In just the same way as their mindset seems to never correct all sorts of other falsities they must know they should.

 

[Barry]

The PACE authors only wrote their paper with the original protocol because they knew once they had to give up the data that it was going to be revealed

Exactly. The timing was just ever-so-slightly enlightening.

 

[Barry]

The SMC response is also being discussed on this thread:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/scien...ss-and-the-controversy.3104/page-4#post-55499

So we now have three SMC releases in 2 days.

''CFS/ME factsheet for journalists: The illness and the controversy''. here

''Reanalysis of the PACE trial'' here

''Expert reaction to reanalysis of the PACE trial for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) treatments'' here

I bet Chris Ponting's excellent comment must have stuck in the SMC's et al craws.

 

[Barry]

Quite so, it's clearly and simply written, not trying to bamboozle readers any more than is necessary with scientific jargon.

Exactly. Winning hearts and minds is every much as important as winning scientific argument is.

 

[Barry]

The Wilshire et al. paper is also covered in the print edition of today's Times – on page 2!

[My bold]

Now that is really good!

 

[Barry]

The SMC's credibility on CFS has run out .

And if true, that means SW's and the rest of his cronies are losing their stranglehold on the British science reporting media. Which is also profoundly encouraging. This is about advocacy coming in from all sides and starting to join up.

 

[Barry]

Easy to overlook in the excitement of all this, but congratulations should also go to BMC Psychology for publishing.

 

[dave30th]

I am sure Ponting's response was not what SMC wanted to see. It demolishes the Stone statement and the absurd response from Sharpe et al. And why didn't they ask my BFF Esther Crawley to comment? Surely she would have given them a slam-dunk statement that despite any criticism, PACE remains a "great, great trial."

 

[Barry]

Surely she would have given them a slam-dunk statement that despite any criticism, PACE remains a "great, great trial."

Well it's a trial that's for sure.

 

[Kalliope]

WebMD:
CBT for ME/CFS study questioned

 

[Barry]

Huge congrats to the authors, especially Bob.

 

[JemPD]

The thing i love the most about all of this, (so far - trying not to count my chickens - we still have the weekend papers to contend with yet - i notice nothing from the guardian which is a worry) but so far the story still got through... despite the SMC attempts to counter it & prevent it. I dont think that would have happened 5yrs ago

And ok much of the reporting isn't perfect, but it's better than it has been. It's a start.

 

[Esther12]

For comparison with the MEAs post

They were critical of the SMC there, so that's better than I expected.

They're still talking as if they're just observers to the debate, rather than a patient organisation that, if it wants to be involved in research, should be able to recognise the clear problems with PACE themselves.

The Canary piece was a bit of a mixed bag imo. There were a lot of good things in there but I felt like it could have done with a bit more editing, and more of an explanation on the fact that the SMC reflects just a noisy and powerful subsection of 'mainstream' UK medicine.

 

[Stewart]

I am sure Ponting's response was not what SMC wanted to see. It demolishes the Stone statement and the absurd response from Sharpe et al. And why didn't they ask my BFF Esther Crawley to comment? Surely she would have given them a slam-dunk statement that despite any criticism, PACE remains a "great, great trial."

Given that Crawley's last major round of media appearances was to loudly express her support for NLP, I suspect that she's now the last person that Team PACE would want to publish a supportive quote from. No matter how 'bad' Ponting's contribution was (from their point of view) it still wasn't as damaging to PACE's standing amongst the scientific community as a supportive quote from Esther "I believe in fairies and psychobabble" Crawley would probably have been.

 

[Londinium]

Well, seeing this on the front page of the BBC when I logged in to my PC this morning was a nice surprise. Congrats all.