PACE trial should acknowledge inefficacy and harmfulness of CBT and GET

By Mark Vink, (Family Physician) the author of the 2016 Review of the PACE trial for which he was nominated for the John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science.

If CBT and GET had really been effective there would have been no need for an extensive number of changes to the recovery criteria made during an unblinded trial, making the definition much less accurate to the point that people who were still (severely) ill were classed as recovered.

The time has now come for the PACE trial authors to stop misrepresenting their own results; acknowledge the inefficacy and harmfulness of CBT and GET to prevent further unnecessary suffering inflicted on patients by physicians/therapists, which is the worst of all harms, yet totally preventable.

MORE @ Observantonline, the journal of the University of Maastricht

Berkeley's lecturer in public health: Bizarre PACE trial response

By David Tuller, lecturer in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley:

They have recently argued, in response to Wilshire et al, that it doesn't matter that some participants were recovered on the physical function or the fatigue outcomes at baseline because there were other recovery criteria. This is truly a bizarre response for researchers to make. It is also a serious violation of the rules of honest scientific inquiry. It is unclear to me why we all have to waste so much intellectual time and energy simply to demonstrate that studies in which participants can be disabled and recovered simultaneously on key indicators should never have been published and, once published, need to be retracted immediately. The PACE authors have no scientific ground to stand on.

MORE @ Observantonline, the journal of the University of Maastricht