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Alem Matthees analyses on released PACE data blast "recovery" claims - huge damage to PACE

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Sasha

Fine, thank you
Messages
17,863
Location
UK
I'm wondering if people realise what's happened. The data that Alem Matthees requested under the FOI have now been released, he's analysed the recovery rates according to the statistical methods specified in the original trial protocol, and they've come up DEAD FLAT NULL and this will be HUGELY DAMAGING TO THE PACE TRIAL.

Two professors of statistics from major universities have confirmed his analyses. PACE can't survive this. This is the point from which inquiries start to be called for on how £5 million of taxpayers' money went down the drain on this.
 
G

Gijs

Senior Member
Messages
691
Sasha said:
I'm wondering if people realise what's happened. The data that Alem Matthees requested under the FOI have now been released, he's analysed the recovery rates according to the statistical methods specified in the original trial protocol, and they've come up DEAD FLAT NULL and this will be HUGELY DAMAGING TO THE PACE TRIAL.

Two professors of statistics from major universities have confirmed his analyses. PACE can't survive this. This is the point from which inquiries start to be called for on how £5 million of taxpayers' money went down the drain on this.
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I agree. When this is published in a medical journal it is done with White and Chalder. It looks to me as fraud.
 
A

AndyPR

Senior Member
Messages
2,516
Location
Guiding the lifeboats to safer waters.
AndyPR said:
@Tom Kindlon posted this on his Facebook page yesterday
View attachment 17387
so perhaps it refers to this? Hopefully Tom will be able to confirm but I'd imagine putting this together so soon after release has probably take a lot out of him, so we'll probably have to be patient patients.. ;)
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Sorry guys, I jumped to an unwarrented conclusion, Tom on Facebook has just confirmed that he is talking about something seperate to the PACE analysis on the Virology blog.
 
alex3619

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Tuha said:
does it look like a fraud or is it just incompetence?
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It depends on the technical details, and on the specfics of what constitutes fraud. My personal opinion is there is enough evidence to at least investigate if it qualifies as fraud, and that was exposed by David Tuller. This current analysis is mostly just about exposing poor "science".
 
V

Valentijn

Senior Member
Messages
15,786
Sasha said:
Two professors of statistics from major universities have confirmed his analyses. PACE can't survive this. This is the point from which inquiries start to be called for on how £5 million of taxpayers' money went down the drain on this.
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It really does look like the beginning of the end :angel:

Tuha said:
does it look like a fraud or is it just incompetence?
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The thresholds didn't change themselves, the authors changed them. And they did it shortly before PACE was published, years after the protocol was published. It doesn't look good, especially since the changes took the recovery figures from "tiny and statistically insignificant" to "moderate and significant".

But that level of incompetence is really just as damning as deliberate fraud would be. In either case, it shows that the PACE authors weren't capable of behaving as trustworthy scientists. And in either case, all of their research (and other publications) needs to be closely scrutinized.
 
A.B.

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
Tuha said:
does it look like a fraud or is it just incompetence?
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Since there was no good justification for changing the protocol, and no good justification for withholding the data from critics, it looks like there was an intention to deceive, which is fraud.

All the other details, such as the flawed design, mistakes, etc. just add to this. They are not evidence of intention to deceive but they can be a way to intentionally produce misleading results. It all adds up to a consistent picture.

A tribunal would probably require better evidence, so they might be safe from prosecution. In the scientific community however, they could and should get in big trouble for this.
 
trishrhymes

trishrhymes

Senior Member
Messages
2,158
I don't know the legal ins and outs of fraud, but to me it's far worse than incompetence. White et al made a deliberate choice to change the pre trial protocol criteria for improvement and recovery.

The only possible reason for watering down these criteria so much as to make them meaningless is to try to increase the numbers fitting into these categories. This is not accidental incompetence.

To then choose not to give the results of analysis on the basis of the protocol cannot possibly be construed as mere incompetence, it must be a deliberate decision. That decision was a decision to hide the truth. That surely is fraud.
 
adreno

adreno

PR activist
Messages
4,841
Changing criteria after data collection is bad science, but I doubt it's illegal. The best we can hope for is a retraction, I believe.
 
A.B.

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
Valentijn said:
I'd rather it stays, but is corrected. Then it remains on the record as showing that CBT and GET are ineffective.
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Either way, something must be done to correct this massive fraud. Open any medical textbook, check the CFS entry, and you'll likely see Wessely school babble about CBT and GEt leading to improvement or even recovery, and "illness attributions" making a difference in outcome, etc. This affects all patients in every country.

I favor retraction because even the original protocol analysis only corrects some of the problems. The other problems may not be obvious to everyone, are unfixable, and can continue to mislead.
 
W

worldbackwards

Senior Member
Messages
2,051
JamBob said:
For example, over on Bad Science, the skeptic types won't accept anything that isn't published in a "peer reviewed" journal as evidence in a discussion of the evidence.
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I've been following the PACE thread over on Bad Science and, curiously, the worse it's looked for the PACE authors, the more their supporters have...generally faded into the background and not had a word to say about it one way or the other. Much like the authors themselves.

They and their cronies are going to have to be dragged to the table on this one way or another. The chief way that they have avoided debate on this has been simply to ignore it and hope it goes away. I wonder if they're really worried yet.

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Also, I'm curious what the implications are as the the psychiatric treatment of fatigue in general. It seems clear that a significant proportion of patients included in PACE had unexplained chronic fatigue type disorders, but we can no longer put any success rates down to their own response, because there is no success rate.

Does this mean that Chronic Fatigue as a disorder is simply untreatable? Or dies it perhaps mean that the behaviourist method of treating people like machines without having recourse to their personal circumstances is dying on its arse.
 
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Sidereal

Senior Member
Messages
4,856
It's good to have this huge N=640 study out there in the published record showing that CBT/GET are ineffective. This works in our favour because it refutes all of the previous small crappy studies showing implausibly large effect sizes. I think the PACE papers should not be retracted but should instead have a prominently displayed Corrigendum attached to each one correcting the faulty analyses.
 
A.B.

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
Sidereal said:
It's good to have this huge N=640 study out there in the published record showing that CBT/GET are ineffective. This works in our favour because it refutes all of the previous small crappy studies showing implausibly large effect sizes. I think the PACE papers should not be retracted but should instead have a prominently displayed Corrigendum attached to each one correcting the faulty analyses.
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Also an option. If the corrigendum truly exposes all the problems.
 
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