Trial By Error

Category: Commentary

  • An open letter to Psychological Medicine, again!

    Last week, Virology Blog posted an open letter to the editors of Psychological Medicine. The letter called on them to retract the misleading findings that participants in the PACE trial for ME/CFS had “recovered” from cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy. More than 100 scientists, clinicians, other experts and patient organizations signed the letter. […]

  • The Dutch Studies (Again!), and an Esther Crawley Bonus

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Wow, the research from the CBT/GET crowd in The Netherlands never ceases to amaze. Like the work of their friends in the U.K., each study comes up with new […]

  • A Follow-Up Post on FITNET-NHS

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week’s post on FITNET-NHS and Esther Crawley stirred up a lot of interest. I guess people get upset when researchers cite shoddy “evidence” from poorly designed trials to […]

  • The New FITNET Trial for Kids

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The past year has been a disaster for proponents of the PACE trial. They have faced growing international resistance to their exaggerated claims that cognitive behavior therapy and graded […]

  • The Real Data

    by David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘The PACE trial is a fraud.’ Ever since Virology Blog posted my 14,000-essord investigation of the PACE trial last October, I’ve wanted to write that sentence. (I should point […]

  • My Questions for Lancet Editor Richard Horton

    By David Tuller, DrPH In January, I posted a list of the questions I still wanted to ask the PACE authors, who have repeatedly refused my requests to interview them about their ethically and methodologically challenged study. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has similarly declined to talk with me, ignoring my e-mails seeking comment […]

  • Once Again, Lancet Stumbles on PACE

    Last February, Virology Blog posted an open letter to The Lancet and its editor, Dr. Richard Horton, describing the indefensible flaws of the PACE trial of treatments for ME/CFS, the disease otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome (link to letter). Forty-two well-regarded scientists, academics and clinicians put their names to the letter, which declared flatly […]

  • A Few Words About “Harassment”

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.   Last week, a commentary in Nature about the debate over data-sharing in science made some excellent points. Unfortunately, the authors lumped “hard-line opponents” of research into chronic fatigue syndrome with […]

  • More Nonsense from The Lancet Psychiatry

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.   The PACE authors have long demonstrated great facility in evading questions they don’t want to answer. They did this in their response to correspondence about the original 2011 Lancet paper. […]

  • Did the PACE Trial Really Prove that Graded Exercise Is Safe?

    By Julie Rehmeyer and David Tuller, DrPH Julie Rehmeyer is a journalist and Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has written extensively about ME/CFS. David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Joining me for this episode of our ongoing saga […]

  • Questions for Dr. White and his PACE Colleagues

    By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. I have been seeking answers from the PACE researchers for more than a year. At the end of this post, I have included the list of questions I’d compiled […]

  • Revisiting the PLoS One economics analysis of PACE

    On October 23rd, virology blog published the third installment of David Tuller’s investigative report about the PACE study of treatments for ME/CFS. In the post, Dr. Tuller demonstrated that the key finding of an economic analysis of the PACE trial, published in PLoS One in 2012, was almost certainly false. The finding–that cognitive behavior therapy […]