Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

Surely its just the same as badly trained faith healers and ones who know what they are doing, you know, like the ones who cure cancer.

 

Indeed but thats the ticket

 

I honestly would just nail him on that. Such and such have given me GET and I got worse, are they to blame or is the therapy itself to blame?

 

This goes back to the point by Wessely et al in the 1989 paper when they said something to the effect that people have said that exercise may cause harm in some, that may be true but......

I have suggested elsewhere that that should have placed upon them a duty to ensure some safeguarding procedure was in place.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1004983629624369154


This is taking disingenuousness to a new level.

Why defend it so much if he thinks PACE is of no consequence?

 

Gaslighting

 

Bull!!

It could have been so different already, not the same, if they had admitted the trial showed zero efficacy.

 

Trolling. And given his track record he's in no position to define what is logical and what isn't.

If the trial had never happened the denial of treatment & support would not have been the same. The precise purpose of the trial was to make it easier to enable such policies. Otherwise, why else give it to a bunch of brown-nosing clowns so willing to ignore and abuse logic and science to get the result wanted?

And when I say "get the results wanted", don't take it from me, but from our naughty nautical friend of the crew:

https://www.nationalelfservice.net/...syndrome-choppy-seas-but-a-prosperous-voyage/

And if that wasn't enough freudian slips from one who should know better, there's one more in the title of the piece (hint - it's the adjective in front of the word "voyage").

 

Yes, he is keeping you off balance with bullshit

 

Oh great. SW's joining in now...



Surely that's just it? It hasn't changed clinical practice in the UK. It hasn't stopped #pwme being treated poorly by their GPs and other medical practitioners. It hasn't stopped people treating it as if it were psychological or "all in the mind", despite what Sharpe may say it says in the Lancet paper. It certainly hasn't led to more biomedical funding.

 

I think the issue is that it didn't change clinical practice. NICE took the PACE authors' positive interpretation of the trial results at face value and chose not to review the NICE guidelines that recommended CBT and GET. A proper, rational reading of the PACE results would have led to CBT and GET being ditched.

So no, PACE didnt change clinical practice when it should have - it should have led to CBT and GET being stopped.

Wessely monumentally misses the point.

 

....and he does so deliberately.

 

I certainly think that PACE led to more confident assertions to patients about the efficacy of CBT and GET, and their ability to get CFS sufferers 'back to normal'. Also, I think that the suffering and hardship inflicted upon patients who had the temerity to point out the problems with PACE, and then faced a barrage of dismissive prejudice, should be seen as pretty horrifying.

 

What were the 'horrendous consequences' of the trial asks Sir Simon? Well, off the top of my head:

- acres of misleading media coverage of the trial (helpfully co-ordinated by his good friends at the Science Media Centre) that unfairly painted patients as lazy wasters who just needed to pull themselves together and go for a jog,
- the ridiculous - and far more importantly, completely inaccurate - improvement and recovery figures that were subsequently promoted to medical professionals all over the world as a reason to prescribe CBT and GET,
- NICE's use of the trial as part of their justification for not reviewing the ME/CFS guideline in 2011 (seven years later patients are consequently still waiting for this to happen),
- the development of the 'dangerous activist ME/CFS patient' narrative which the PACE team cooked up when they realised that they didn't have any good answers to the criticisms that patients were making of their shoddy methodology and failure to grasp the basics of good trial design.

Feel free to throw any of this back at him @Lucibee.

 

It also have led to a reinforcement of bureaucratic and insurance practice ... denial of benefits until CBT/GET was used. PACE was part of the whole fiasco, which is in part why DWP funded it. That has spread to other countries, including Australia. It also changed medical culture, reinforcing the previous position. PACE slowed and railroaded change and rational medicine.

So PACE was not solely responsible, but that does not mean it had no impact.

If PACE had no impact surely they would not object to retracting it? [Satirical]

 

PACE led to a reinforcement of the bad way things were being done. Accurate reporting of the findings would have resulted in change, some of which we are seeing now (despite still being held back by the effects of PACE).

 

Made the pursuit of biomedical research more difficult

Facilitated adoption of dubious methodology for other psych studies


Where children are concerned , the combination has enabled families to be split up and iat

 

Iatrogenic damage to be done
Comorbid treatable conditions to be disregarded
Other illnesses to be written off without investigation
......