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Another positive development likely resulting from the IOM report.

Not really. Fukuda criteria are not equivalent to chronic fatigue. Many of these patients could have met more stringent criteria.

He wants patients that are already biased towards reporting improvement.

I haven't looked at these studies yet (is it even worth it?) but I'm expecting the usual methodological holes that allow all sorts of biases to influence the results. An expert might just be a person that is good at making the same mistake every time...

26 is Childhood trauma in chronic fatigue syndrome: focus on personality disorders and psychopathology by Spanish researchers including Castro Marrero. 27 is Childhood stressors in the development of fatigue syndromes: a review of the past 20 years of research by Chalder and Pariante.

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if there was none of this wishful optimism. So... no hope that some trivial thing like B vitamins or exercise would cure us. No illusions that patients can figure this out on their own. No illusions that it will just go away on its own, or...

And of course not wanting the treatment is a sign of not being of sound mind.

Seems so. There's also an event before it for early career scientists. https://www.nih.gov/mecfs/events

There is also the NIH conference.

Reading this makes me think I have some other illness than these patients. Why am I not getting better? One could say that in some aspects I have improved, but there is clearly no general improvement, more a trend to decline further.

Interview techiques may result in higher prevalence of childhood abuse because interviewers can inject their bias. A retrospective design is also susceptible to recall bias, which would increase rates. The authors appear to be thinking that patients need help remembering or something like that.

The authors never question whether these patients might have an organic disease that is not yet detectable with current technology.

PACE scientists. In a decade or two it's going to widely have negative connotations.

The records for adverse reactions could be interesting. The safety claims could be just as false as the improvement and recovery claims. The adverse reaction assessment was done by people who believed that the intervention couldn't do harm and that patients were merely reacting hysterically to...

If he keeps doing the soft GET where reducing activity levels is allowed in response to an increase in symptoms, then he could spend a year or two trying to recover with GET. If in that timeframe a recovery caused by passage of time occurs, he will likely attribute it to GET.

Here's what cognitive restructuring is (source: Wikipedia) The authors appear to view increased odor sensitivity as problematic. Accordingly the cognitive restructuring will probably aim to suppress any negative thoughts regarding odors. Essentially, patients are instructed to answer...

Karl Morten said that he tested patients before and after GET and found no improvement in metabolic abnormalities. A publication of these results in a formal study would put an end to the claims that exercise treats the illness (instead of perhaps just one of its consequences).

Alternative interpretation: he was bedbound for a while, but then improved which allowed him to increase his fitness through a GET program.

I'm trying to determine whether it is accurate to say that PACE provides evidence that the illness model behind CBT/GET is incorrect. My conclusion is that it provides evidence that inducing biased responses does not work. Whether that invalidates the illness model depends on whether the...

It is contradictory to say that PACE provides no evidence that the treatment works because placebo effects were not controlled for, while also saying it provides evidence that the underlying model is incorrect. Either we know what the change in outcomes meant or we don't. There are good reasons...