Interesting article. If annoying in places.
Yes, one side of the debate says 'recovery' should represent an improvement in health and a return to ordinary activities, whereas the other side of the debate says that 'recovery' should represent a deterioration in health after treatment and severe physical impairment.
Hmm.. I can't imagine why there were a flurry of angry responses from patient groups when deterioration was mislabelled as "recovery"! These patient groups are soooo boring and pernickety about details sometimes!
I thought the way the recovery piece was phrased was strange by starting it with a 'n a two-year follow up of the PACE study, published in
Psychological Medicine, ' they appear to be confusing the long term followup paper in the lancet with the recovery paper. Or perhaps they are just saying it took them two years to find a definition of recovery that let them claim success.
What really strikes me is that Miller and Collins appear happy to put opinions into patients mouths without bothering to understand what is being said or reading the criticism. Or worse is they are knowingly misrepresenting the facts. Either way is bad. If people like Collins doesn't understand the substance of the criticism of PACE how can he properly assess stats from other similar studies. Perhaps his comment that his BACME study had roughtly the same results as PACE was more due to seeing movements in only subjective measures.
In saying CBT is used for cancer Miller shows he really hasn't understood the nature of what is being proposed in PACE and the criticism. Or is just choosing to mislead the journalist.
However, I thought the journalist had clearly tried to do a good job talking to a range of different people including Fluge and Mella who always come across as very good and careful in what they say. Its just obvious that there is a group of people involved with CBT and GET in the UK who will keep twisting their message to keep their beliefs.