*October is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place:
https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602
On September 24th, the Royal Society of Medicine hosted
a webinar called “Long-COVID: Understanding the shadow of the virus.” In
a previous post, I criticized one of the panelists, infectious disease expert Alastair Miller, on several grounds. He promoted graded exercise therapy, made unwarranted claims about recovery rates from CBT/GET treatments, and suggested that the PACE trial suffered only from “bad press” rather than methodological violations that appear to meet definitions of research misconduct.
Carolyn Chew-Graham, a professor of general practice research at Keele University in Staffordshire, also participated. Professor Chew-Graham is the main author of the Royal College of General Practitioners’
unfortunate online training program on CFS/ME, which I critiqued
here. That program, METRIC, is based squarely on PACE and its so-called “sister trial,” the FINE trial. (Professor Chew-Graham was a co-author of the FINE trial.)
These trials, and the CBT/GET paradigm itself, are grounded in the notion that what patients say about their symptoms should be dismissed and disbelieved. To recover, patients must learn to replace negative thoughts about their abilities and energy levels with positive ones and overcome their irrational phobias about exertion. The interventions rely on the unproven hypothesis that deconditioning, and nothing pathophysiological, is the cause of the prolonged debilitating symptoms.
Professor Chew-Graham is also a prominent player in the field of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms.” Since she and her colleagues identify CFS/ME as an MUS, the theoretical approaches are pretty similar. Deploying
flawed research, the powerful MUS lobby in the UK has expended enormous efforts to ensure that GPs shunt off patients whose symptoms they don’t understand to psycho-behavioral interventions, rather than referring them to medical specialists.
