Evidence based care for people with chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis, 2021, Sharpe, Chalder & White

Isn’t the technical term a circle jerk, @dave30th ?

 

Who marks these people’s homework?

At the risk of evoking our friend Mike Godwin’s law, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

 

Yes, especially if it was peer-reviewed by Professor Sir Simon Wessely and Professor Rona Moss-Morris!

 

I think the timing is too odd. Either the authors sat on the paper for nearly a year after being asked for minor revisions, or, to make more sense, there was active collusion from an editor in terms of timing of acceptance and publication.

 

I forgot that just last month I wrote a blog post about the abstract, which King's College London posted on its site. The article has introduced even more ridiculousness:

https://www.virology.ws/2021/10/23/...ame-misunderstandings-for-get-cbt-criticisms/

 

The brazenness is astounding, particularly the invocation of a need for further GET/CBT trials. It screams: we can do what we want, when we want, and with total impunity.

It almost reads like something the Sharpe parody Twitter would compose as a gag.

 

This paper says so little.

This form of 'debate', where they present the points that they want to answer, in the form that they want to answer them, and then reply, seems a bit odd to me.

They cite the paper on blinding that @Michiel Tack made interesting comments on.

The references for this point seem odd - I wonder if a section was removed in peer review?

I wish this had open peer review as it would be interesting to see if they had wanted to make more of an argument and were held back, or if this was their original intent.

 

I'd be happy to join them, if we three can pen something?

 

When they claimed this it was 14 years after the Helman paper (1992), when they had it published it was 17 years (1995).

But it was still nonsense, there were antiviral therapies then. Sharpe himself wrote about acyclovir before this.

This whole sentence is a sight of ridiculous argumentation. Not just the "common knowledge" claim while antivirals exist, but also that if that statement were true it would therefore be a disadvantage to connect a viral aetiology to ME (like the knowing of the or even "a" why isn't important to understand the illness and develop prevention- and treatment options) ànd the whole notion that the label of an illness should carry information about how the sufferer can recover. #ThatIsNotAThing

 

It's called the illusory truth effect, and together with Occam's Broom they made ample use of it. (The Oxford group spent 7 years promoting CBT for ME in books and at symposia before there even was a RCT published about it that claimed it worked.) They've never been great argumenters of their content I think, but they've been masters at repeating their narrative wherever they can.

I've seen something like that happening in the early years, so it would not surprise me if that was a regular tactic.

 

I actually laughed out loud at it. It's like these guys' stamp of authenticity of their papers: you can't have one without it saying "more research is needed" at the end. It's indeed almost a self-parody.

They're a bit like an Escher picture.

 

The link to the PACE trial manuals is not working.

 

The previously working link on S4ME (same) wasn't working either.


But this one does work: Projects - Pace Trial - Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine - Barts and The London (qmul.ac.uk) It has a similar but different URL

 

have reported the link from the library thread https://www.s4me.info/threads/the-pace-trial.22088/ be amended to
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/wolfson/research-/current-research-projects/projects/pace-trial.html

 

Quite right.

One of the things that bugs me about this mob is that they can do studies with objective outcome criteria (actimetry - FitBit type things) in fact there is baseline (pre-intervention) data from the PACE trial. If they actually wanted to research these interventions then they'd be applying for grants and challenging the government to fund studies with objective outcome criteria.

A useless researcher doesn't want to do objective research - these folks are even worse than that; they undermine the case for objective research into these interventions.

@rvallee commented that they seem to retire/un-retire ---- they should just retire.

 

The only thing that really needs to be pointed out is that reference 5 points to the old NICE guidance, which is out of date.

They therefore cannot claim that anything they say is "evidence based".

So the whole thing needs to be retracted as "out of date".

I strongly suspect that the editors of JGIM were unaware of the publication of the new NICE guidance, and if they were, they would remove this article.

 

yes, I've checked in with Brian about writing a letter. it does seem warranted to respond. I'm trying to write a blog to amplify the points made in my previous blog about the abstract. So many more stupid points. And as has been suggested by @Esther12, @snowleopard and others, they raise straw-person arguments and then even offer weak rebuttals to those.

 

Let's do it!