A.B.
Senior Member
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One of the things I was trying to wrestle with in my post was the distinction between what was found in the PACE study and what was claimed. It seemed to me that much of the criticism of the PACE investigators was that they overstated what they found. Is it possible that there were small improvements on the continuous-scaled measure, but not the “recovery” that was stated or implied at various times? That would be consistent with the idea that these treatments could be helping some people (after all, CFS is a broadly-defined syndrome, so it should be no surprise that CBT and physical therapy could help some of them) but without the clear resolution implied by Richard Horton.
Oh dear. I think I give up. He doesn't seem to the understand that small improvements on subjective outcomes are exactly what should be expected in an unblinded homeopathy trial. That these are there doesn't mean there must be a working treatment somewhere in there. In principle it's not impossible but the rest is more consistent with a null result than anything else... and one way to find out if there had maybe been some people for whom the therapy worked well is individual data, which the authors are refusing to publish.
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