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Sorry that I missed answering these: I'm slowing down! It is very difficult to get across just how confusing it was to sort through all the responses. I can give you my broad overview, but I cannot be sure that it is right because someone would need to work through all the stuff and check it...

I think what baffles me is that they have confidence that a treatment or therapy is strong enough to treat or ever cure ME, and yet believe it is gentle enough to leave no harm, whereas in reality, it is hard to devise something that actually cures or helps things, but it is so very much easier...

Not at all, @Lucibee ! There's never a chance of that. Like me, you want to get to grips with the data (and like me, you would have been going bananas at their answers!). Always pleased to help if I can. My problem is that I often focus so much on the answer that I forget to "soften" it with...

Sorry, that was a hasty posting. Meal time was approaching and I was required! As the report says at the start, we sent out 57 enquiries. This is my unchecked analysis: two did not claim that they were rehabilitative, so we excluded them: three stated that the clinic no longer exists: four were...

We sent out a lot more than that. We ended up with 38 that offered rehabilitative treatment and replied: there were two that replied and didn't offer rehabilitative treatment: some did not give us anything because it was farmed out to private contractors. "setbacks" and "symptoms may worsen...

This was one of the hardest pieces of information to sort out. We did ask for follow-up after the treatment had finished, but it seemed as though many clinics took the last session of treatment with a "So how do you think it is going?" enquiry as a follow-up. That is my personal interpretation...

No, my comment above explains that 4 of the 12 that answered that "symptoms may worsen temporarily" did not mention "setbacks", i.e. they were not in the 15 above. You cannot assume any data is a subset of another unless we explicitly state so. If it had been possible to simplify the data more...

And I didn't answer that properly, did I? It isn't in the report, but going back to the original spreadsheet, I count 4 centres that said "symptoms may temporarily worsen" that did not say that "setbacks may occur": the other 8 said both. You may puzzle over why our analysis wasn't clearer. It...

Rather than read it from the perspective of someone looking for evidence of harm, it might be better to read it from the perspective of someone who has read repeated assurances from specialists and clinics that (as most suggest) the therapies are safe. There were many examples where questions...

A little-know study on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Crowborough Criteria) discovered 100% recovery after full immersion in semi-solid dihydrogen oxide. Objective tests were used, and patients' abilities to leap from the baths, with explosive vocalization was compared with that of healthy humans (a...

The PACE trial had 641 patients, and, over the course of a year, from what we can see from the data released, no-one actually fully recovered in the sense that you or I would understand. The FINE trial was similar. The question is what the 5% figure actually represents. Presumably it means 5%...

Yes, @Jonathan Edwards , I am sure that we agree on most of this. The one thing that I am uncomfortable about though is this idea that you need to find someone who is able to understand the whole picture. Maths coursework, like the statistics coursework, was much more open-ended in the early...

I understand your comment, but I hope you will understand that, as teachers, we often ended up marking work from students with particular knowledge or skills way beyond ours. Probably the most challenging for me was a piece of coursework which involved programming in a language unknown to me...

True, but for many years they earmarked $6 million per year for ME/CFS, even though it didn't get spent on the sort of stuff we would like. I very much doubt whether the total state funded research into biomedical research on ME/CFS over the last 40 years much exceeds $6 million. Like Andy, I...

The MRC do not work like the American NIH. The NIH earmark a certain amount of money for each category of "illness", and that is the amount on offer that year. (Although, in reality, chunks of the money set aside for ME/CFS have been "lost", or spent on non-ME stuff). The MRC does not have an...

Moderator note: This post has been copied, and posts discussing it moved from this thread: Patient Representative Reports from Dr Karl Morten's collaborative group, Oxford, UK The MRC do not work like the American NIH. The NIH earmark a certain amount of money for each category of "illness"...

If his marks from the three assessors are along the lines of 9, 8, and 3, then it follows the pattern that Jonathan Kerr reported many years ago (assuming that they still run the same system). If that is so, and if we could find out what scores Morton obtained, I think it would form strong...

I did submit a comment when it appeared, but no comments have been shown yet.

Returning to my comment about the number of patients in our ME support group – I was thinking about this on my slow amble with an elderly dog around the block, and realized that I should have been more mathematically explicit. Members of our support group do not represent the ME community...

Oh yes: definitely. But it is equally true that her diagnosis of EDS was the result of her accidentally being sent to the wrong person to deal with her "ME" decline. Effectively she had been regarded as someone with ME who was also hypermobile (including easily dislocated joints). For the other...