Trial By Error

Tag: PACE

  • My Tour of Ireland, Through Wind and Rain; Slides of My Talk

    Last month, I took a quick speaking tour around Ireland at the invitation of the Irish ME/CFS Association. I first became acquainted with Tom Kindlon, the association’s assistant chairperson, about ten years ago. I was beginning to look into the background of the PACE trial, which purported to have proven the benefits of graded exercise…

  • PACE Authors Respond to Monbiot Column with Tired Arguments

    Last week, Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote another scathing column about the failure of the UK health care system to address the plight of people diagnosed with ME/CFS. (Monbiot’s previous column on the issue appeared in March; our interview about it is here.) The new column was pegged to the case of 27-year-old Maeve Boothby…

  • Actress Jennie Jacques Interviews Guardian Columnist George Monbiot and Me about the CBT/GET Ideological Brigades, and More

    English actress Jennie Jacques is known for her roles in the BBC’s Desperate Romantics, a 2009 series about the Pre-Raphaelites, a police procedural called WPC 56, which ran from 2013 to 2014, and Vikings, a History Channel offering from 2015 to 2019. In 2021, she discussed having developed ME/CFS in a profile that appeared in The Times,…

  • The Michael Sharpe Crowdfunding Effect

    In the past, Professor Michael Sharpe, one of the lead PACE investigators, has intervened in my Berkeley crowdfunding and given my efforts a significant–although presumably unintended–boost. In the spring of 2018, I spent six weeks traveling around Australia, a trip that overlapped with that April’s crowdfunding campaign. During the campaign, Jennie Spotila endorsed it with…

  • Guardian Columnist George Monbiot Calls Out the GET/CBT Charlatans and the Fraudulent PACE Trial

    In a blistering take-down published on Tuesday, Guardian columnist George Monbiot indicted Professor Sir Simon Wessely, Professor Michael Sharpe and the rest of the GET/CBT ideological brigades for their decades-long promotion of discredited theories about and bogus research into the cluster of illnesses now being called ME/CFS. Those theories and research strategies reached their apotheosis,…

  • Debate Over Recent Citation of Arguably Fraudulent PACE Trial

    Having a discussion about the PACE trial with someone who still maintains it was a well-conducted study is like debating the 2020 election with a Trumper who insists that Biden lost. These two distinct groups exhibit the same remarkable inability or willful refusal to understand and accept reality, whether it involves basic scientific constructs or…

  • The 7th Anniversary of My Expose About the Fraudulent–i.e. Misleading, Deceptive–PACE Trial

    *October is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error: project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/33528 This month marks the seventh anniversary of Virology Blog’s publication of my 15,000-word investigation of the egregiously flawed and fraudulent (i.e. misleading, deceptive) piece of…

  • Research From GET/CBT Ideological Brigades Shows No Improvements in Work Status

    Last year, Mark Vink, a Dutch physician with ME/CFS, and Friso Vink-Niese, an independent researcher, published a review of occupational outcomes among ME/CFS patients after treatment with either graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The results were not pretty. When viewed specifically through the perspective of employment status, the treatments bombed. This…

  • The UK Health Research Authority’s Missteps on PACE and the Declaration of Helsinki

    *April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347 *Note: To give credit where it’s due, Magical Medicine: How to Make an Illness Disappear, an exhaustive investigation from Malcolm Hooper and Margaret Williams, first…

  • The Lancet Publishes Whine de Coeur from Impassioned GET/CBT Defenders

    The Lancet has just published an anguished whine de coeur from supporters of the graded exercise therapy/cognitive behavior therapy/ [GET/CBT] approach to ME/CFS. (Or CFS/ME, as these authors insist on calling the illness in what those familiar with the debate will recognize as a childish fit of pique.) These impassioned members of the GET/CBT ideological…

  • Professor Chalder Messes Up Again in New Paper on CFS and Employment Outcomes

    Same-Day Update: In re-reading the new paper, I noticed that the discussion section also features errors involving the percentages. It includes this sentence: “About 9% of individuals who were not working at baseline had returned to work at follow-up.” And this one: “Further, 6% of those working at baseline were no longer working at follow-up.”…

  • PACE Authors Now Blame “Misunderstandings” for GET/CBT Criticisms

    It is hard to know what to make of the news that a peer-reviewed journal has actually accepted a PACE-reunion paper from the three lead investigators—Professors Michael Sharpe, Trudie Chalder, and Peter White. Even more so for a paper titled–without irony, it seems–“Evidence based care for people with chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis.” This…