OK but that is actually wrong too. The poor methodology and invalidity of the results is transparent from the original Lancet article - which was the basis for my expert witness testimony to NICE. Getting the PACE data was a huge and necessary achievement in order to see the detail of the manipulation but it actually made no difference to the interpretation.
As much as we want medicine to be guided by science and evidence, and it should be, we still live in a world in which facts aren't quite true until authorities acknowledge them and the professionals under their rule not only accept them but use them as is in their decision process. At least facts that aren't predictive and reliable enough for people to simply replicate them for themselves.
We were right decades ago. We aren't more right today about it, the facts are the same. But that those facts have been acknowledged by some medical and scientific authorities does matter more than the facts themselves. Unless a scientific fact or theory can make accurate predictions, scientific knowledge remains largely a popularity contest where people, experts but still people with their own biases and agendas, vote on what is true and on what the facts are.
Most MDs look at those trials, including PACE, and think they are great, they are satisfied that being taken as is by authorities assures them that it's all true and good and that they don't need to look any further. They are assured that the emperor's invisible clothes look great and silky and golden, they're not going to be the ones disputing that. Even knowing about the methodological flaws, the moving of goalposts, the flawed definitions, the lack of proper controls, the fact that the treatments are basically all about influencing responses. They feel confident that all of this must be a misunderstanding since authorities, and most of their colleagues, think it's fine and valid and good.
In the same vein, if one day the Lancet, likely with a different editor-in-chief, acknowledge their error, does what they did with the vaccine MMR paper, the facts will not have changed, but the fact that a prominent organization in academic medicine will acknowledge it will matter more than the facts themselves.
We don't live in a just world. In fact we live in an unjust world where all facts are political right up until they can be formed into a coherent predictive scientific theory. Which is not a state that all facts can reach. The facts are what they are. We know better. But that doesn't matter, because we are nobodies, and almost every medical institution believes otherwise, which matters far more than inconvenient facts they choose to ignore.
