Trial By Error

Tag: PACE

  • Quartet of Trials Reveals Limitations of CBT for “Medically Unexplained Symptoms”

    A year ago, I wrote a post about how the biopsychosocial ideological brigades had completed a trifecta of major studies that investigated cognitive behavior therapy for a variety of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS). As a group, the studies demonstrated the overall ineffectiveness of CBT as a treatment for this category of disorders—despite herculean efforts…

  • Letter to Lancet Editor Demanding Independent Investigation of PACE (Reprise from 2018)

    *April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 In August, 2018, I organized an open letter…

  • The World According to Sharpe

    *April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 Poor Professor Michael Sharpe. The distinguished psychiatrist from…

  • Guardian Columnist George Monbiot Is Causing Long COVID, Says Professor Michael Sharpe

    *April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 In a remarkable display of—well, I’m not even sure what to call it–Professor Michael Sharpe has blamed…

  • Biopsychosocial Brigades Seek Traction with Long Covid

    Last week, two major articles on long Covid appeared in well-known US publications—one in the Atlantic, the other in Vox. Like the New York Times Magazine article that ran in January, these stories addressed with nuance the complex and unclear relationship between the varieties of long Covid and the group of entities collectively known these…

  • Happy Tenth Anniversary, PACE Trial!

    It’s been ten years since The Lancet published the first results of the PACE trial. Wow! Ten years ago, I was 54 and still a graduate student in public health at UC Berkeley. I was also busy writing stories for The New York Times about the mouse retrovirus study that had roiled the field of…

  • Professor Paul Garner’s BMJ Blog Post on His Powerful Cognitions

    Professor Paul Garner, an infectious disease doctor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, has had a rough time with long-Covid. He has written about his experiences in a series of compelling blog posts on BMJ’s site. At first, he bonded with members of the ME/CFS community and expressed shock at the shoddy treatment these…

  • The CDC’s Stakeholder Meeting

    The US Centers for Disease Control held one of its occasional briefings for ME/CFS stakeholders last week. I was unfortunately busy during that time, but #MEAction has posted a useful account of what was discussed, which you can read here. The #MEAction account includes short, helpful descriptions of a number of CDC initiatives, including efforts…

  • More CBT Research from Sir Simon and Professor Chalder

    (*Thanks to the the very informed discussion–and discussants–on the Science For ME forum for alerting me to this study and its many problems!) In 2011, Professor Trudie Chalder declared at a press conference for the high-profile PACE trial that twice as many chronic fatigue syndrome patients who received cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy…

  • Disinformation About Treatments for Post-Covid Syndrome

    Professor Trudie Chalder is a lead investigator of a series of studies of rehabilitative interventions for so-called “medically unexplained symptoms” that have failed to meet expectations but have nevertheless been promoted as demonstrating treatment success. The piece of crap known as the PACE trial is a prime example. Most famously, Professor Chalder declared at the…

  • Excellent News Coverage of UK Genetics Study in The Times

    Note: The DecodeME team held a Facebook Q-and-A this week. If you want more information about the study, you can watch the video here. Two major UK government funding agencies recently announced grants totalling £3.2 million to support a major genetics study of ME. Whatever the long-term findings of DecodeME, spearheaded by the CFS/ME Research…

  • Trio of Trials Shows Limits of CBT for Medically Unexplained Symptoms

    Lancet Psychiatry recently published the results of a high-profile trial of cognitive behavior therapy as a treatment for so-called dissociative seizures, also known as psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. The trial, nicknamed CODES, found that CBT had no impact on seizure frequency–the primary outcome. The average number of seizures per month dropped in both the treatment and…