It is simply amazing to me that anyone with a scientific, medical or health background could fail to see the deep flaws so clearly evident in the PACE study & associated published literature.
A total lay-person armed only with an enquiring mind & attention to detail is more than able to identify fundamental flaws that go beyond simple mistakes & jump off the page as amateurish attempts to manipulate the results.
As a former scientist, – now living with severe ME – I am further amazed that the peer-review process so fundamental to accepted scientific process failed to identify glaring issues in experimental design, data collection, & analysis.
I simply cannot comprehend how Peer reviewers let this, & other papers, be accepted.
And one has to wonder why the journals, & their editors, were willing to publish such deceptive ‘work’.
A quick check of the key names involved in this deception reveals a virtually revolving door of the same names either doing the studies, reviewing the work, or publishing the outcomes.
In so doing they have displayed ongoing disrespect for patient wellbeing & scientific rigour.
Untold numbers of patients have been harmed physically & emotionally by the resulting inappropriate treatments which continues to this day; yet the eminence-based ‘science’ continues to be promulgated by health practitioners who have either not read the actual studies, or scarier still, have not understood the many flaws in the PACE trial & related studies.
Berkeley based public health academic & investigative journalist David Tuller is a leading researcher calling this cabal to account; yet PACE-styled Graded Exercise Training & its accompanying Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is still recommended to this day.
If the peer review process repeatedly refuses to reject shoddy ‘science’ then peer review itself must be regarded with suspicion at the least, & perhaps be totally disregarded.
That a handful of ‘scientists’ are prepared to harm patients & tear down fundamental practices of scientific process simply to gain further ‘eminence’ & presumably personal profit also amazes me.
But that the scientific, medical & health professional communities do not stand as one with patients & call out these people & their unethical practices astounds me.
We are all diminished as a result.