When the data from the PACE trial, run by Sharpe and others, was reanalysed according to the researchers' own protocol it was found that the 'treatments' CBT and graded exercise therapy were no better than placebo effects. To get the results they wanted, the PACE researchers moved their definition of 'recovery' - after the data had been collected - so much that on some criteria a patient could be both classed as disabled enough to take part in the trial, and 'recovered'. Such overlap of entry criteria and recovery criteria is completely unscientific and should never have been published. Hundreds of good scientists are appalled by the unscientific work carried out by Sharpe and others.
The PACE researchers used a definition of 'chronic fatigue syndrome' that only required 'six months disabling fatigue'. ME is a serious illness whose cardinal defining symptom is not just fatigue, but post exertional malaise. That means sufferers are made significantly sicker by trying to do normal activities due to severely reduced exercise capacity. It also includes rapid muscle fatiguability and slow recovery, as well as a host of other unpleasant an disabling symptoms. Sufferers have been made significantly worse by trying to push through and exercise.
Objections to the treatments prescribed by Sharpe and others (which don't even work for fatigue) being applied to ME sufferers are based on the treatments not working and making patients sicker. Sharpe himself repeatedly reiterates on Twitter that his research was about CFS, not ME, yet the treatments are being applied to people with ME and are, according to large patient surveys, making many people with ME sicker.
The patient community do not condone on line harassment of anybody, but nor do they condone psychiatrists using the media in an orchestrated campaign to denigrate people with a severely disabling illness on the basis of a few unpleasant tweets from a few individuals who may or may not have ME.
Patients with ME and/or CFS are desperate for good quality scientific research and support wholeheartedly the scientists carrying out such research, much of which is funded by donations from sufferers and their families. They do not object to science, they object to research that is of such poor quality that it causes harm, and to the perpetrators of that unscientific research using claims of 'harassment' as a smokescreen to try to avoid their bad science being uncovered.
