Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

Am I being dense and not seeing a quote or does MS not state anywhere that “ME can be cured by counselling”? Seems foolish to tweet this at him if so.

 

The Daily Mail article quotes him:

So an interpretation of this quote I assume.

Edited - the text quoted do seem to heavily imply behavioural therapy will do the trick.

 

Ironically over-generalising is one of the basic 'cognitive errors' addressed by CBT.

 

MS says he agrees biological factors may limit improvement with behavioural treatments,
but by biological factors he might just be meaning the old claim of physical deconditioning and therefore he's not saying anything new, just teasing, manipulating us?

 

Of course no one ever lies in their Twitter bio.

By the way, my Twitter bio says I'm an animagus.

I prefer the term "Predatory Journal" because that's what they really are...

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1002478050838286337

I'd like to think MS was suggesting an Oxford union style debate here, or similar public discussion. We could field @Jonathan Edwards for the anti-PACE position vs Sharpe for the pro-PACE team... OK, it's probably not gonna happen, but it was a sweet idea for a moment

 

My reply would be this epic David Tuller open letter (if someone has twitter and wants to use it)
http://www.virology.ws/2016/02/10/open-letter-lancet-again/

 

A monkey could do it in his tea break!

 

There is only ONE issue we can show is scientific misconduct. One. The others are irregular and damage the study, but we cannot prove they are not due to bad study design, incompetence or stupidity. That one is the use of SD for calculation of normal using SF36PF data. Not only is it mathematically unsound, they knew it was mathematically unsound, or at least PDW did. He published on this in 2007.

 

I think it is a reasonable and valid inference from the following quote in the article:-

"Many patients with chronic fatigue syndrome are being held back by a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, according to a leading researcher.

Oxford psychiatrist Professor Michael Sharpe said that some people with the condition do not push themselves to recover.

His team today publishes findings which suggest a form of counselling is the most effective way to treat chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as ME."
[My bold]

If that is a fair quote of what MS actually said, then given the bits I emphasised, and the flow of what was said, then the tweet was a fair inference from the above I think. Being as it was a newspaper article reporting on what MS said, however, it may be their report skewed the flow of what was said and so skewed the context; in which case the tweeted inference may be wrong.

 

I would have thought malpractice to be a more likely thing to go for.

 

The current claim with the GMC is probably more along those lines. Unfortunately I would need to know a lot more about UK law, and GMC rules, to say much. Its very much up to local laws and regulations.

Scientific misconduct generally has no legal redress. The issue is that it can destroy careers, end tenure, and prevent grants.

 

If you click on the tweet, the heading that is generated in the preview of the article is: “All in the mind? ME can be cured by counselling, says Oxford Professor,” which is where I took it from. But you are right to point out that the exact quote is not currently repeated in the article. Perhaps the heading was changed and they forgot to update the meta tag.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1002646443759423488


I thought this was interesting. I understand that harm was not carefully monitored. Have there not been PACE trial participants stating that no interest was taken when they claimed to be deteriorating?

 

Somebody please skewer this tweet

 

Done. The trial minutes show they didn't deal with adverse events properly. They knew they were happening, but just told participants to ignore them or, according to patients who were in the trial, these patients were never followed up.

 

He will simply deny these things.
I would respond with the lowering of recovery to worse then entry and if that therapist manual is verified material repost it, and point out denying it will get him nowhere.
If anyone has links of patients statements that would also work well.

 

For a psych trial PACE was unusually good at monitoring harm. Their measure for 'harm' relied upon subjective self-report outcomes, and there slightly more adverse events in the GET group, which the PACE researchers then decided were not related to GET, and there have since been participants who've said that their condition seriously declined while doing GET as a part of PACE, but 'harms' is still not a great place to criticise PACE imo.

Kindlon wrote this good summary of the issues: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1359105317697323

We've since had those minutes @adambeyoncelowe mentioned released - there seem to be some worthwhile quotes in there, but I'd still be cautious on this whole issue.