Trial By Error

Tag: PACE trial

  • David Tuller’s Fundraiser

    If you appreciate the articles written here on ME/CFS, please consider supporting him financially at Crowdrise. David is an investigative reporter with a doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. Since the fall of 2015, David has waged a determined effort to expose the methodological and ethical problems with the PACE trial for ME/CFS.…

  • CMRC to Virology Blog: “F**k Off!”

    Well, not in those words, of course. It was all very polite. But that was the message. Here’s what happened. On Monday, I posted an open letter to the members of the board of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative. The letter involved the false accusation of libel that the CMRC’s deputy chair, Esther Crawley, disseminated against…

  • An Open Letter to the Board of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative

    To Members of the Board of the CMRC: Not long ago, at the annual conference of the British Renal Society, your deputy chair disseminated the false accusation that I had libeled her. As a corollary to that, she also disseminated the false accusation that Dr. Racaniello, the Columbia University microbiologist who hosts Virology Blog, had…

  • 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 New FITNET Trial for Kids

    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 exercise therapy are effective treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as ME/CFS. The recent court-ordered release of key trial data has confirmed what was long…

  • My Questions for Lancet Editor Richard Horton

    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 for the initial investigation,…

  • 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…

  • More Nonsense from The Lancet Psychiatry

    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. They did it again…

  • 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. Joining me for this episode of our ongoing saga is my friend and colleague Julie Rehmeyer. In my initial series, I only briefly touched on the PACE trial’s blanket claim of…

  • Questions for Dr. White and his PACE Colleagues

    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 by last September, when my investigation was nearing publication. Most of these questions remain unanswered. The PACE researchers are currently under intense criticism for having rejected…

  • Why has the PACE Study’s “Sister Trial” Been “Disappeared” and Forgotten?

    In 2010, the BMJ published the results of the Fatigue Intervention by Nurses Evaluation, or FINE. The investigators for this companion trial to PACE, also funded by the Medical Research Council, reported no benefits to ME/CFS patients from the interventions tested. In medical research, null findings often get ignored in favor or more exciting “positive”…

  • Did the PACE Study Really Adopt a ‘Strict Criterion’ for Recovery?

    First, some comments: When Virology Blog posted my very, very, very long investigation of the PACE trial two weeks ago, I hoped that the information would gradually leak out beyond the ME/CFS world. So I’ve been overwhelmed by the response, to say the least, and technologically unprepared for my viral moment. I didn’t even have…