Subtropical Island
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Non-complaining sick people = higher rates of ‘cure’ that can be claimed.But - even if that is the belief - what the data keeps showing is that even if you change what people think, it doesn’t actually change their behaviour. They aren’t more active, they don’t get back to work, they don’t use fewer resources in terms of benefits etc... so that must be seen as a failure.
I don’t think non-complaining sick people is usually the goal, if the research is sponsored by the DWP! Fine for the health service, but not otherwise.
So, no, not useful for society, resources, govt funding, etc etc (those who fund the research).
But useful for the people doing the ‘research’: we got funded, we did something, it got published as a ‘success’, we’ll get more funding for ‘research into effective treatments’. (My inner cynic wants to say: better outcome for these ‘researchers’ than a cure would be).
The scammed are not just patients but funding bodies.
The sad thing is that when you have been scammed, it’s often very hard to ‘give up’ and admit that all your ‘good work’ has been a fail. Easier to rationalise.
This is human.
What we need is modern scientific method: where every negative result adds to our body of knowledge.
The old quote about the filament for lightbulbs: (something like) not 100 failures but 100 things we now know don’t work well.
ETA What i’m trying to say here is that studies like PACE can have real value. We need to all (especially the people involved in publishing PACE) appreciate the value of a result that confirms the negative of your hypothesis, or yields a null result. If mistakes are made we need to review them and learn from them.
A conclusion that something is not significantly effective is a useful conclusion. A conclusion that there are better ways to run a trial is also a useful conclusion - so long as you make future trials better.
This is what is so brilliant about this reanalysis: we are looking at what what really found, and what was not. The ONLY way to make progress.
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