Professor Trudie Chalder, Professor Peter White and like-minded members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades have appeared desperate in the last year to promote their favored interventions, publishing one shoddy paper after another. This stream of sewage has seemed intended to influence the new ME/CFS clinical guidelines that Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has been developing since 2017. NICE
called off the scheduled August 18th publication of the new guidelines, which formally reject the longstanding treatment paradigm for ME/CFS, because of fierce objections from the cabal of CBT/GET true believers.
High-profile researchers like Professor Chalder and Professor White continue to mislead readers and tart up pathetic findings from both randomized trials and clinical services. Patients long ago recognized that this research base is a mountain of hooey. In recent years, that clear-eyed perspective has become more widely adopted. It is not surprising that NICE now finds itself squeezed between the actual evidence on one side and the braying of eminent pooh-bahs on the other—that’s what happens when paradigms undergo major shifts.
Those on the losing end of the scientific argument—in this case the CBT/GET cabal—are exquisitely aware of their deteriorating position. They know that the new NICE guidelines will have a negative impact on their reputations and ambitions. It is easy to understand why they are so motivated to prevent NICE from publishing the guidelines in their current form.
The new guidelines, for example, could hamper ongoing efforts to extend these psychological and behavioral treatments to all forms of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms”–whether through the National Health Service’s metastasizing Improving Access to Psychological Therapies program or through other means. The guidelines will also impair the ability of the CBT/GET cabal to colonize long COVID as yet another category of MUS requiring their forms of rehabilitation rather than a biomedical approach. Just this week, the British Psychological Society
proposed the creation of screening tools to identify people suffering from “perfectionism” and other unfortunate personality traits that are purported risk factors for developing long COVID. (I gather this proposal has now been rescinded.)...............
