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"Moving the Goal Posts to Catch the Ball and Other Hazards of A CFS Treatment Trial" (Patient POV)
- Thread starter Dolphin
- Start date
"The trial serves as a model for how not to conduct a clinical trial and criticism of it has been abundant, as Rehmeyer explains. Worse still, its conclusions that exercise and cognitive behavior therapy are effective have underpinned clinical practice guidelines around the world. That’s a bad thing because the conduct of the trial was questionable, making its recommendations moot and harmful to patients."
Glycon
World's Most Dangerous Hand Puppet
- Messages
- 299
- Location
- ON, Canada
This is an incorrect and misguided way of conjoining two important and fair claims. Whether the recommendations are harmful is a matter of objective fact. If, as seems to be the case, the what is recommended is unlikely to do good and likely to do harm to people with this illness, that is not because of the dodgy and incompatent conduct of the trial, but because ME just doesn't work this way. That would still have been the case even if the conduct of the trial was exemplary or if it was even more questionable than it is.
The article alludes to another important fact, which in my opinion has more to do with the sad state of affairs in the field of Me/CFS medicine than any malicious machinations on the part of governments and business interests. The mythology of "the power of positive thinking" is a real blight and one of the main drags on human progress in the modern world. What makes it so insidious is that it is so nebulous and so deepli ingrained that its agents are often unaware of it themselves.