Specific aspects of the complaint
1.
Professor Esther Crawley is currently under investigation by the GMC for negligent management of a young person with the condition in which she alleges to be an expert, this management being exactly the same as that which is to be used in her FITNET study so strongly promoted by the BBC.
Had the BBC’s journalist done his homework, it would surely have tempered his overly enthusiastic support for Professor Crawley.
2.
Throughout the day, the BBC reporters did not place the issue in proper context: there was no mention of the discredited PACE trial of CBT/GET in adults: in 2011, itwas hailed by the Science Media Centre and hence the UK media as successful, but following a five-year quest to obtain the raw data for re-analysis by independent statisticians, when the Judge ordered the raw data to be released, it was found to be fraudulent and that instead of the claimed recovery figure of 22% after CBT and GET, the actual figures were only 7% for CBT and 4% for GET, meaning that there was a null result from the PACE trial.
3.
The reporting was inaccurate (66% of participants were said to be “cured”) because it grossly exaggerated and mis-represented the findings of a small Dutch study in young people upon which the FITNET trial relies as evidence of efficacy: whilst there was a significant difference in school attendance at six months in those who received internet CBT
versus those who received “usual care” (75% vs 16%), the ultimate findings of the Dutch study showed no difference between the groups at 2-year follow-up. The BBC reporter failed in his duty to mention the actual results of the Dutch study, which was that children who did not get any CBT did as well as those who did get CBT, nor did he mention that three of the four thresholds used in the Dutch trial for “recovery” were virtually the same as for the entry criteria into the trial, nor that two of the Principal Investigators of the PACE trial (Professors White and Chalder) commented that in the Dutch study, most children met the trial criteria for “recovery” when they entered the trial -- a comment not without irony,
as exactly the same situation occurred in their own PACE trial of CBT/GET in adults.
4.
Undue credence was given to the behavioural theory of ME/CFS even though that theory has long since been debunked throughout the international medical community.
5.
The interview with Professor Crawley at 8.15 am on the BBC Today programme was heavily biased towards her own views, with very little time given to the opposing views of Jane Colby, Executive Director of TYMES Trust (The Young ME Sufferers Trust, the longest established national UK service for children and young people with ME and their families and winner of the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service), so the BBC clearly did not present a balanced view.
6.
There was a further lack of balance in that no medical expert who disagreed with Professor Crawley was interviewed –
even the Medical Advisor to the ME Association was not informed that this item was to be broadcast and was excluded
from participation.
7.
Based on the extensive biomedical evidence, the FITNET trial cannot offer hope or promise of recovery and to broadcast that it can is in breach of numerous medical codes of conduct and to mislead patients by promising a cure when there is no such certainty is in breach of the General Medical Council Regulations as set out in “Good Medical Practice” (2006):
“Providing and publishing information about your services – paragraphs 60-62
60. If you publish information about your medical services, you must make sure the information is factual and verifiable
61. You must not make unjustifiable claims about the quality or outcomes of your services in any information you provide to patients. It must not offer guarantees of cures”.
Although this is an issue for the GMC and not primarily for the BBC, nonetheless the BBC gave undue prominence to unproven interventions and incorrectly reported the trial as curative.
8.
Given the insistence of the psychosocial school that ME/CFS is a behavioural disorder, this FITNET trial is likely
to become another weapon to force children with ME/CFS to undergo interventions which can make them even more sick and its extensive roll-out throughout the NHS may be used as a vehicle for the forcible removal of children from their parents and home, a situation that is already rampant in the UK.
9.
The BBC coverage was so hyperbolic and it afforded the FITNET trial so much publicity that it was clearly organised as a counter-punch to the anti-PACE evidence which is now gaining world-wide attention.
10.
Many international medical scientists and clinicians with whom I am in contact who are involved with the biomedical pathology of ME/CFS (including not only those in the UK but those in Canada, the US, Scandinavia, Holland, Australia and New Zealand) are appalled at such unjustified and uncritical publicity afforded by the BBC to a study which is based upon speculation, not upon science.
