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Quite. If the full PACE data were available I'm sure much better insights could be gained about how meaningful - or meaningless - there claims regarding PEM really were.

That's not quite right. The 2011 PACE paper has four mentions of "postexertional malaise", though I suspect they bandied the term around without any real insights into its implications. Would love for the full PACE data to be made available so that such things could be more deeply critiqued...

A question @Jonathan Edwards: When a normally healthy person goes down with a really nasty bout of flu, they feel pretty ghastly as we all know. Presumably there are physical biomarkers that can be measured correlating with this. And yet when a pwME is in a similar or worse state, there are no...

Agreed, honesty has to be the best policy. Anything else would be a slippery slope. Edit: Realise that could be misconstrued as a slur on your good selves @PhysiosforME, which I assure you it is not. Hugely impressed with the work you do.

Exactly. Both will result in skewed answers, but how much is attributable to each of those two factors will be indeterminable.

Absolutely. Which is why I think it is time to properly highlight that their trials exhibit a form of bias that has perhaps not been fully exposed before, and has maybe allowed them to peddle their nonsense a bit too easily. Though I do appreciate that nothing is ever likely to penetrate their...

Attempting operate as an expert system, but with highly dubious expertise in a lot of scenarios.

Yes, the treatment programme builds in skewing of people's beliefs, perceptions, etc, and that is true no matter if anyone asks them about those perceptions or not. But if then questioned about their perceptions, their answers will be biased away from truth/reality because their perceptions...

Understood. It's just that people being what they are, some will ignore your hyphen and insert their own! Maybe some word other than response ... treatment-outcome induced bias?

In a way that sums it up perfectly.

I realise that in my posts here about treatment-inherent cognitive bias (or whatever we eventually decide to call it) I may have been giving the false impression I believe it to be the sole source of bias from treatments like CBT, GET, etc, rather than response bias. But that is not what I...

Not sure about that one @Invisible Woman, for two reasons. The word "response" here will be muddling two meanings of that word. Response bias is nothing to do with response to treatment, but response to a question. I know you know this, but many would conflate things. And also that the...

'' 'The requirement to control for placebo problems will make it too difficult to “get an effect”' We actually do see this (or something close to it) being used. Considering that blinding is a form of controlling for unwanted effects in trials, the BPS crew have been known to say a good few...

Yes. The intended outcome of these treatments is to shift cognitions, it is not merely a side-effect of the treatment. So I think "treatment-inherent cognitive bias" is closer to the mark. Though that description could still encompass treatments where messing with cognitions was an inevitable...

Yes I like that also. I think it important to include the 'cognitive' bit, because it is the shift in cognitions as an outcome of the treatment - beliefs, perceptions, etc. - that this kind of bias is rooted in. It's kind of spooky, because it is the treatment itself that potentially skews...

Yes, you can imagine a 15 stone person answering a survey question asking their weight. If they say 15 stone then no problems. But they might think "sod that!" and respond with 13 stone, in which case that is response bias - they knowingly skew their response at odds with what they know to be...

Yes, that is so weird! Trialling a treatment, the point being to gather evidence of its efficacy, but a component part of that treatment being to impress upon participants that the treatment is already evidence based. Talk about incestuous logic.

This sounds akin to the problem that used to occur with older style voltmeters, Avo voltmeters etc, where the very act of connecting the meter could change the very voltage you were trying to measure. Much less of a problem in that case however, because the characteristics of the meter were...

In which case the dominant bias operating here is not response bias. All manner of things might influence how someone responds to a questionnaire, but that does not automatically mark it as being response bias surely? Response bias is about responding to a questionnaire, survey, etc. in a way...

Yes, me too. Very much so. CBT is a powerful tool. Abuse of any powerful tool can be harmful, which is why you don't put them into the hands of children I totally agree with this. I don't believe it is too strong. Manipulation can imply motive, but by no means automatically does. You can...