"The denouement". My answer to prof. Knoop.

They create an image of this disease as being mainly about chronic fatigue. This notion is a central theme in the studies by professor Knoop and professor Bleijenberg. Often criteria are used where chronic fatigue is the primary focus, and where PEM is only optional (variation on the FUKUDA criteria) or worse: completely absent (variation on the OXFORD criteria).
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Very important, that bit. Seems to have been swamped a bit lately by the – highly justified – critiques focusing on subjective outcome measures in open label studies and changes in outcome measures part way through a study. So it's good to bring it to the forefront again. If you don't start with a well-defined patient cohort any study results will be invalid, no matter how good or bad the study methods are afterwards.

Somewhere I saw the analogy that confounding the symptom chronic fatigue with the illness ME/CFS is like confounding the symptom headache with the illness migraine. Imagine you collected a bunch of people with sore heads, of any sort, and used that cohort to find a treatment for migraine. Likely you'd reach the conclusion that aspirin was effective for migraine!
 
As New York State Health Commissioner, Howard A Zucker, wrote in May of last year (bolding mine):
Howard Zucker said:
In the past, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and a graded exercise therapy (GET) were recommended as treatments. However, these recommendations were based on studies that included patients with other fatiguing conditions. Because of the hallmark intolerance to exertion of ME/CFS, exercise may actually worsen the health of those living with this disease.
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