full text https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00440-1/fulltext?rss=yes
Importantly, this is an editorial: it’s the Lancet Infectious Diseases editor speaking ex cathedra, rather than a personal view from a researcher or clinician. The job of an editorial is not to challenge the preconceptions of the readership, but to bolster and refine them. So it’s refreshing and cheering to see this while publications in the BMJ stable are behaving so poorly.
...have no treatments proven to be effective in clinical trials to help their patients. We got nothing. That is where the discussion has to start.
Interesting editorial. When ME/CFS advocates argued that more funding should go to testing non-pharmacological interventions we were always accused of having a reductionist mind, biased against psychotherapy, blocking progress, etc. And anyone that mentioned that some seem to minimize ME/CFS to reduce insurance and disability costs, was seen as a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
The editor may well be a journalist who happens to be sympathetic to the PWME cause. The editorial officers do not appear to be medics.
Good to see this in the Lancet, but it is sorely missing the very significant, and stubbornly continuing, role that the Lancet played in this. They could radically change this by retracting PACE. A good example of the head and the hands not talking to one another. Still, this is frank.
The editor in chief of LID is Ursula Hofer. Although she has been working in medical publishing for a while, she qualified as a doctor in Berne and practised as a clinical immunologist at University Hospital Zurich while engaged on doctoral infectious diseases research. Brief industry stint, then moved into scientific journals, mainly Nature. She looks like someone who is eminently well qualified to speak for the infectious diseases community, if not as a senior clinical peer, then certainly as an insider with reassuring credentials.
