I think you are conflating improvement and recovery, they each had separate criteria (both of which got loosened in the revised protocol). The 60% figure is for improvement (revised protocol) 6.8%/4.4% is for recovery (original protocol)
True, but the authors went to some lengths in their public statements to create and exploit this confusion. This bears on the charge of being grossly misleading, and not by accident. The statistical weakness of research dependent on questionable "recovery" of a handful of patients remains pertinent.
There is also a problem with the secondary measures, and all objective measures were made secondary. It seems the authors interpret secondary measures as being very significant when they support authors' beliefs, and completely irrelevant when they undermine those beliefs. This is characteristic of non-falsifiable beliefs.
There was nothing I could see in the earlier material to even address the issue of recovery without objective improvement, yet this is exactly what happened with CBT. Evidence for recovery via GET involved discordant results, with the step test showing no objective improvement, and the walk test offering questionable and marginal improvement. (Why weren't the step test results reported with other data?) None of the alleged benefits of therapy showed up at long-term follow-up. If this is true, we have to ask "in what sense has anyone recovered?"
This research either falsified the idea of "false illness beliefs" being the root of the problem, or the claim that the preferred therapies were effective in changing these. It shows clearly that the illness is scarcely responsive at all to psychological treatment. You would never guess this from public statements by the authors.
