Your argument is pointless for two reasons -
1)These is no way to tell who actually has ME/CFS (it's not even one thing anyway) and therefore no study could prove someone either
does have it or
doesn't have it.
So I could equally say, show me a study that proves everyone is organically sick? And when you can't, follow that up with a crowd pleasing, but nonsensical - unless you can prove it, everything you are saying is psychobabble.
2)The placebo effect predominantly affects subjective complaints - feelings of pain, feelings of depression. Therefore, when I posed the question, how may RA patients have gone from wheelchairs to running miles within minutes of shouting "STOP", and more importantly remained well? Professor Edwards knew the answer. Placebo studies have shown zero objective response to malaria, TB, autoimmune hepatitis and most organic disease.
@
Firestormm, at what stage would that be? - after 30 years of mindless research where grouping everyone together has proven ... NOTHING! Are you seriously suggesting we should wait and wreck another promising trial? I appreciate that you may be naive to the history of ME, but people were talking about subgroups in the early 1990's - so please tell me, when is the right time?
Incidentally, have you actually read the "pre-trial" B-cell studies that have been done? The results are meaningless, there is 100% overlap between healthy controls and patients on all measures tested - the results can't be used to select anyone for anything.
In those studies the only difference between controls and patients was that the controls had data with a wider distribution - what is called "extended tail" distribution. In such circumstances, statistical analysis fails abysmally because it assumes both populations are the same other than the thing being tested. Changing from a student T-test to a Mann-Whitney
rank sum analysis does not solve this problem.