Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Occupational Status: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study, 2021, Chalder et al

Kitty said:
I could really have done with someone advising me that I should be making plans to withdraw from work a lot sooner than I did! Not that this is what they mean, of course.
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If just a single doctor had said to me at the start: We really don't know what is going on for patients with this. You are going to encounter some serious hostility and mistreatment from my profession and the world. Downsize your life, dig in, and be prepared for the possibility it might be lifelong.

Still would not have been easy or fun. But almost certainly would have turned out a lot less worse.

Medicine is not obliged to have answers. But they are absolutely obliged to admit it, and not desperately fill the knowledge gap with destructive psycho-drama morality-play crap just to avoid having to admit it. That I cannot forgive them for.
 
Also, it is rich to have Chalder calling for work-related outcomes given that the PACE authors rejected the objectivity of this measure in the end because it didn't yield any positive results. They dismissed it because economic changes meant that getting back to work was not necessarily just up to patients.
 
"Unhelpful beliefs such as fear of activity and exercise and concerns about causing damage, combined with all or nothing behaviour and behavioural avoidance, were associated with not working and are specifically targeted in CBT and, to some extent, GET"
 
Ok, Chalder appears to have mis-written the abstract, judging by the full paper. She did not mean that 53% of those who were in employment at baseline stayed in employment. That's incorrect. According to the actual data, 53% of the entire sample of 316 was employed at both baseline and follow-up--not just 53% of those employed at baseline. This is a case of people so clueless and so indifferent to language and meaning that they don't actually notice that what they write makes no sense.
 
And here’s what they write: “Studies into CFS have placed little emphasis on occupational outcomes, including return to work after illness.”

The authors call for more attention to this domain but do not mention that PACE included such an outcome and had null results.
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Which they downplayed and dismissed.

Getting damn close to fraud, isn't it. :grumpy:
 
It’s confusing.

So 9% of the whole cohort had a change from “not working” to “working”.
Would this statistic have not looked “better” (from Chalder’s pov) if it had been expressed as the percentage of the “not working” returning to work? Ie the % would have been a higher number.

Perhaps that error was made so it could also be made with regards to the 6%.

So, let’s see, 6% of the whole cohort had a change from “working” to “not working”.

This would also be a bigger percentage if expressed as a percentage of those “working” at the start.

Actually, IF only 6% of the entire cohort were “working” at the start (sorry I’ve not looked at the actual figures) then this could mean that a full 100% of the working-at-start group had to stop work!

I wonder what that actual figure is?
Is that the figure that needed obfuscation?

Statistics eh!

PS Okay found some percentages, so it’s not my extreme suggestion. Yet it does seem a weird error to make.
 
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