Thanks for the summary
@Jonathan Edwards , and the speech
@Bob (not read it yet though).
Hmmm... that actually sounds pretty bad to me. The 'reality of patient care'? Decided by who? Despite it's flaws, PACE does provide some information that patients can use to make decisions about what they want to spend their time on. It's results need to be fully presented, with information about potential problems with bias and in the context of what we know about placebo responses... but it's still better than just leaving things to the 'clinical judgement' of those who've built careers on claiming to have expertise of value to CFS patients.
I find that worrying, especially in the context of this sort of attitude:
It would be really good to hear more about this. I doubt recordings were made (why let patients see what's happening? It would risk limiting what people felt comfortable saying) but any extra info on what weaknesses others were concerned by would be of interest.
(Am I in a bad mood? I responded almost entirely negatively to a positive summary. I guess I think that those who have built their careers on the the biopsychosocial approach to CFS need to be able to pull out surprisingly strong arguments, of they need to start apologising).
Thanks to Charles for his summary too.
Isn't there a bit of a contradiction there?
Would be good to know what criticism was made of the BMJ (and good to know that there was some).