The PACE trial is only one instance of the bad science / pseudoscience at the heart of the medical profession and psychiatry: it is the whole notion of somatoform disorders that acts as a wellspring of bad science in medicine.
The concept of somatization needs to be purged from medicine. The empirical evidence base for somatization is really non-existent.
ME/CFS is only one of several diseases that had the horrible misfortune of being sucked into the vortex of unscientific stupidity known as somatization theory. Conditions like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, interstitial cystitis, lower back pain of unidentifiable cause, non-cardiac chest pain, and others have all been tarred with the somatization brush. Once you tar a disease like this, the amount of serious biomedical research done on the disease plummets.
If you want to do a good job of tackling bad science / pseudoscience in medicine, you need to tackle the whole pile of nonsense that is somatization. The concept of somatization is the last bit of Medieval magical thinking corrupting the science of modern medicine.
However, I understand it was Simon Wessely who was largely responsible for reanimating the theory of somatization, and bringing it back into mainstream medicine. The term somatization was introduced in 1924, but as a concept fell out of use and circulation (no doubt because it could not be empirically validated). But Wessely reanimated the theory of somatization, brought it back into mainstream medicine, and indeed has made his career out of it. Somatization is Wessely's baby.
So anyone who wants to tackle the bad science of somatization needs not only to tackle the PACE trial, but also be unafraid to take the axe of empirical scrutiny to the whole theory of somatization, which is Wessely's baby and career.