Rethinking the treatment of CFS — a reanalysis and evaluation of findings from a recent major trial of GET and CBT (2018) Wilshire et al.

From Wikipedia

During July 2016, The Canary achieved over 7.5 million page views, ranking 97th in readership among British media organisations, slightly higher than The Spectator and The Economist. The site's publishers, Canary Media, rose 47 spots from 126th in June to 79th in July among the top UK publishers.[47] The majority of its site traffic comes from Facebook.[4]

 

Very interesting to contrast Chris Ponting's comment with that of Jon Stone on the SMC site. (I actually thought David was being serious and looked for an ASMC site!) Ponting's is the full square common sense response of someone who understands scientific experiments - and how they go wrong. Stone in comparison reveals himself to be a man who has no clue.

Of course Wilshire's interpretation explains the lack of efficacy of 'adaptive pacing' because adaptive pacing was a fake invented treatment in which the therapists had no vested interest. It specifically came with the message that it would not make people better. CBT and GET came with the message that they would make people better. When people are asked to play charades they play charades. No registrar of mine was ever this dumb.

 

Or a man who knows full well what's what but is prepared to back his colleagues none the less. Also he seems to be heavily into MUS so I guess he doesn't want the whole façade to collapse.

I wonder if he has any links with the health insurance industry?

 

Yes, that is a real sea change.

 

Another article https://questioning-answers.blogspo...chronic-fatigue-syndrome-still-put-paces.html

 

It's one of the classic tricks these people resort to all the time - tell only part of the truth, so the statement is deliberately ambiguous, knowing your listener will jump to an interpretation you want them to, and is untrue. It's a very sly form of lying, even though they have not explicitly lied, and will claim they never lied. But it's why in a court of law you have to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"; if you don't then you perjure yourself. In just the same way as their mindset seems to never correct all sorts of other falsities they must know they should.

 

Exactly. The timing was just ever-so-slightly enlightening.

 

I bet Chris Ponting's excellent comment must have stuck in the SMC's et al craws.

 

Exactly. Winning hearts and minds is every much as important as winning scientific argument is.

 

[My bold]

Now that is really good!

 

And if true, that means SW's and the rest of his cronies are losing their stranglehold on the British science reporting media. Which is also profoundly encouraging. This is about advocacy coming in from all sides and starting to join up.

 

Easy to overlook in the excitement of all this, but congratulations should also go to BMC Psychology for publishing.

 

I am sure Ponting's response was not what SMC wanted to see. It demolishes the Stone statement and the absurd response from Sharpe et al. And why didn't they ask my BFF Esther Crawley to comment? Surely she would have given them a slam-dunk statement that despite any criticism, PACE remains a "great, great trial."

 

Well it's a trial that's for sure.

 

WebMD:
CBT for ME/CFS study questioned

 

Huge congrats to the authors, especially Bob.

 

The thing i love the most about all of this, (so far - trying not to count my chickens - we still have the weekend papers to contend with yet - i notice nothing from the guardian which is a worry) but so far the story still got through... despite the SMC attempts to counter it & prevent it. I dont think that would have happened 5yrs ago

And ok much of the reporting isn't perfect, but it's better than it has been. It's a start.

 

They were critical of the SMC there, so that's better than I expected.

They're still talking as if they're just observers to the debate, rather than a patient organisation that, if it wants to be involved in research, should be able to recognise the clear problems with PACE themselves.

The Canary piece was a bit of a mixed bag imo. There were a lot of good things in there but I felt like it could have done with a bit more editing, and more of an explanation on the fact that the SMC reflects just a noisy and powerful subsection of 'mainstream' UK medicine.

 

Given that Crawley's last major round of media appearances was to loudly express her support for NLP, I suspect that she's now the last person that Team PACE would want to publish a supportive quote from. No matter how 'bad' Ponting's contribution was (from their point of view) it still wasn't as damaging to PACE's standing amongst the scientific community as a supportive quote from Esther "I believe in fairies and psychobabble" Crawley would probably have been.

 

Well, seeing this on the front page of the BBC when I logged in to my PC this morning was a nice surprise. Congrats all.