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As I have said before, its about showing the issues to everyone OTHER than them. They cannot concede. What they do not understand is that without treatment or cure, without social equality, we cannot concede either. We will keep struggling for good science and social justice as long as it takes...

Using specialised meanings and then switching meaning to a new context is a common issue here. Heck they even do it with terms like harm, CBT, GET, CFS, normal, recovered, and so on. Monism does away with all this BPS babble in one sweep, and the dualist dilemmas disappear. The problem is most...

It also have led to a reinforcement of bureaucratic and insurance practice ... denial of benefits until CBT/GET was used. PACE was part of the whole fiasco, which is in part why DWP funded it. That has spread to other countries, including Australia. It also changed medical culture, reinforcing...

Actually we have many biomarkers. We just have not proved to a sufficient degree they are diagnostic, nor do we understand the cause.

This is where the large portion of responsibility lies, though not blame. Its failure to act for the most part. The other factions in society where this has happened have less responsibility. Its also about many aspects of society, including businesses, organisations and institutions, some of...

Sigh. This is too often the case with most people. It will require a real moment of inspiration for someone to leap out of reality denial, and simple reason and evidence is not sufficient.

My recollection of the placebo effect is that its mostly about changing perception about pain. A placebo in a clinical trial (typically double blinded) is chosen because it should not have a physical effect, and is used as a comparison to help eliminate perception changes in subject or...

Five year decline after two months in hospital. Physically recovering a bit but my brain has not gotten the memo yet.

Its important to note that the different arms might have had different placebo doses. Its hard to quantify placebo and so we cannot be sure they received the same dose, especially when its in an unblinded trial and there will be subtle personal interactions.

Hi, I think you can safely treat this as a factoid. I am preparing a long reply. It would help if I could recall where I got this number from, but in the meantime I am compiling a list of issues. It will take a while. By my count it is a lot less, but I will be working on that. I might put a...

'Well a subset of scientists, mostly not experts in trials, at least some of who have pretty strong feelings about the findings. How many trial experts do you think find it a good trial - not perfect but good? ' I would argue ... zero. Anyone who finds it a good trial is providing evidence they...

Its actually a variation on appeal to authority, its appeal to expert authority, where an expert is someone who has been granted the authority of an expert by peers, but may or may not deserve it. In any case even experts get it wrong, just less often than average.

Its zombie science, science promoted not by sound experimental evidence but through funding and political influence. I have a blog on this on PR.

My issue with this claim is not that it is not true, but that we cannot prove it. I mean, 37 (?) major problems with PACE, and counting, and we can only prove one is deliberate. Its exceptionally unlikely that many or most or even all are not deliberate, but we cannot prove that. I like to stick...

A year one tertiary science student who pays attention and actually reads assigned reading might be able to do it.

Agreed. Consensus is a managerial or political process. Its for when you do not have adequate evidence but must act. Its subject to far too much bias and manipulation. When you see a consensus process you are not seeing just science, but it can be scientific managerial, or scientific political...

I became aware of a PACE participant in the middle of the trial who I think was doing GET. They were saying that they complained they were getting worse and then the person interviewing them wrote down they were doing fine or something. The implication was that their symptoms were being treated...

While there is a reason for long-term follow up to see how a treatment works over a longer period, one of the factors to be considered is that if the original results are due to bias then no difference in the long-term might indicate that.

We can hope.

But are they paying for people to travel, their carer, their carers travel, etc.? Are these people covered if they get worse and need to stay in the US until they improve a bit, which may never happen?