Specialist treatment of CFS/ME: a cohort study among adult patients in England, 2017, Collin and Crawley

That's the exact opposite of what they've been selling and marketing for years. Good to see they had the sense to admit this one lapse but it hasn't changed anything in their work or messaging since so what the hell does that say about the whole thing? That they keep debunking their own assumptions and never cease to promote them, unchanged from their early days, themselves largely unchanged from their origins over a century ago.

It's not as if this "specialist treatment" is specialist in ME so I don't know the point of pretending other than for purely marketing purposes. These people are absolutely not specialists in ME and have never bothered to learn the basics.

This is clearly not a valid ME cohort if only 19% were on sick leave. Or this is a strictly mild cohort anyway, an unrepresentative sample.

I would assume most of that 18% of "returned to work or increased hours" were "increased hours". Why they would pool them together obviously reeks of burying relevant data. So basically nearly twice as many worked less or stopped working than those who worked more or resumed working. And this is here is on actual objective data, not some completely invalid "returned to normal by meeting the functional threshold of an average 80 year-old".

This would appear to be consistent with fewer people working or working less, and thus having some limited ability to expand that energy. Basically it shows that removing the work requirement from chronically ill patient increases their quality of life. Who knew?! Besides literally everyone.

But in an Orwellian twist, evidence does not actually matter in evidence-based medicine. Despite the rosy baseless claims about vague generic improvements on arbitrary questionnaire scores, this debunks everything these people have been selling for decades. And it won't even matter, they will keep making the same claims they have been making baselessly.

And even though this is an unrepresentative sample, the 5% rate of "recovery" is still there with a clearly mild cohort. Basically playing on easy mode with cheat codes and still losing.

Interesting, @dave30th.

 

Hmmm... should probably merge the threads? It's hard to keep track of things with brain fog but even more so with so many papers that are almost identical to one another.

 

"CFS/ME is a long term condition that persists for the majority of adult patients even after receiving specialist treatment."

Exactly. My first thought when I read that is that they finally seem to be tacitly conceding their findings over the years have been grossly over-hyped. Worried they may not be so convincing after all.

 

Given the degree of attention such research is being given due to long COVID a tactical retreat ?
Let's a research focus move whilst retaining status ...

 

A good day to bury bad news?

 

Maybe these were people who didn't have ME to begin with, and found a different diagnosis. I also wonder what the results would be from people who would have fit the criteria for the study, but didn't get the 'specialized treatments'. I'm sure some would also have improved. Also, did the people who did get the treatments not do any self-treatments that might have affected their severity? Sounds like a pretty meaningless study, at least from the perspective of people who really do have ME. Bureaucrats might love it, since they can probably find something in it to justify whatever they like.