It’s another month, and here’s
another worthless paper from Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s factually and statistically challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). In her desperate effort to prove that the treatment paradigm for ME/CFS combining CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) is evidence-based, she has now published a paper called
“A systematic review of randomized controlled trials evaluating prognosis following treatment for adults with chronic fatigue syndrome.”
The article was published in the journal
Psychological Medicine, which seems to function as an in-house public relations organ for the GET/CBT ideological brigades. Professor Michael Sharpe and Professor Sir Simon Wessely are on
the editorial board; that says it all. In 2013, this august journal published
the PACE trial “recovery” paper, in which participants could get worse on key measures and still be counted as “recovered.” Editors at
Psychological Medicine refused to acknowledge the violations of standard scientific practice on full display in that paper. Articles in the journal, at least on this issue, cannot be taken at face value.
In this latest piece, Professor Chalder and colleagues trot out data on post-treatment, short-term, medium-term, and long-term outcomes from 15 papers based on clinical trial data. The authors purport that the collective results show benefits after treatment with CBT and GET. As with so much of what Professor Chalder touches, it is crap. She does not understand that her work is essentially meaningless—except in that it occasionally documents the opposite of what she claims. That was the case with the now-discredited PACE trial, which is one of the studies included in the review. (Papers rebutting the PACE findings are not included.)
To start off, it is jarring to read a 2022 article that cites
the 2007 guidelines from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for what the agency then called CFS/ME–but that completely ignores
the 2021 version for ME/CFS. In fact, the article was submitted to
Psychological Medicine last November, a month after publication of the new ME/CFS guidelines. At that point, the 2007 guidelines were no longer operative, and referencing them as if they are renders the paper immediately out-of-date–as if the authors are still living in a past era. This decision also raises questions about the competence and integrity of the authors. (On the other hand, this is Professor Chalder, so in her case such questions of competency and integrity have already been definitely answered.)
