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This article is being discussed on reddit. Most people seem to be taking the side of the activists and PACE critics.

What do people even mean with "mental cause"? Perhaps we understand the term differently than them.

Freud's big "innovation" was the idea that disease could have an emotional cause. Over a century later and medicine still clings to variants of this idea. The idea has lost a lot of ground. Hardly anyone still believes that cancer is caused by repressed emotions. Instead there are modern...

The turning point was the NAM report (the IOM is now the NAM). The NAM report was commissioned in reponse to the CFSAC. The CFSAC existed to advise the HHS on CFS. I believe the CFSAC included a mix of scientists and patients. To me this looks like patients were being heard while...

Yes. It was a complicated program. The homework was keeping several kinds of diaries, planning activities and so on. https://me-pedia.org/images/8/86/Apt-participant-manual.pdf Ironicall, I think one of the first things I would drop from my life was such a complicated program because it's not...

I can't quite follow. Sharpe and colleagues say that My understanding is that the control group SMC was not matched in terms of credibility or contact time. It is this control group that would tell us whether the other therapies have an "active ingredient" that positively affects the illness...

That's nice to hear. Can you explain why? Agreed. These articles are unpleasant but it would be worse if no one was talking about the fact that there was a conflict in this area. The article is so onesided it will tell some readers that there is more to the story.

It's a perfect opportunity to tell them they should do the actigraphy study @Jonathan Edwards wants to see.

They say Organizations are strongly encouraged to submit a single response that reflects the views of their organization and membership as a whole.

I'm not sure what to say about this argument, except I can't believe they are writing this. To their credit, they did try to control for some non-specific effects related to the presence of a therapist by turning pacing into a therapist assisted treatment (APT). Contact time was also matched I...

According to the PACE authors, bias in subjective outcomes was not really a problem. Presumably they are referring to the scales used, the Clinical Global Impression Scale, the SF-36 physical function scale, the Chalder Fatigue Scale and some others. They appear to be suggesting that scales...

Thanks, this cheered me up. They are losing ground where it matters. Not because of online trolls but because their work is indefensibly bad.

It's also revealing that they do not describe in any detail how they defined recovery, presumably because if they did, anyone with some familiary of the scales used would immediately see that there is a problem: So here's recovery as originally defined (left) versus how it was defined in the...

As far as I know, they did this because it was planned in the original protocol. The PACE authors appear to consider this "excessive" because it doesn't give the results they were expecting (the original protocol is very optimistic about finding large treatment effects that would easily...

It means they are in denial about the fact that the findings reported in PACE are entirely consistent with placebo effects. It could also mean that they're just trying to win the debate by producing a lot of bullshit hoping that it will confuse and convince naive readers.

I wonder what they say about severity of symptoms. People often see a doctor for minor problems that are probably too mild to be diagnosable.

It's rather hard to do a sensible analysis of problems whose only common denominator is being unexplained.

Also, how can online activists silence anyone? Do they block Sharpe on Twitter? :confused::D Anyway, I think the advice by ME Action is good. Don't click on the article, don't share it. Ignore it, but do make fun of their desperate lies.

There's nothing that says defeat like a special report full of lies.

So nice to hear this.