13 JANUARY 2020
By David Tuller, DrPH
It has been almost two years since BMC Psychology published
a key reanalysis of raw data from the PACE trial. Given the significance of this paper (of which I was the least important of seven co-authors), I figured it wouldn’t hurt to highlight it again.
The
heroic Alem Matthees, a patient in Perth, succeeded in liberating the relevant data through a Freedom of Information request, but only after Queen Mary University of London spent £250,000 in legal fees in its efforts to prevent access. The reanalysis documented that the benefits for CBT and GET reported in multiple PACE papers were either exaggerated or illusory when the data were assessed per the methods detailed in the trial’s published protocol.
The paper, which appeared in March of 2018, was called “Rethinking the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome – a reanalysis of findings from a recent major trial.” Its publication ensured that these criticisms of PACE had been vetted through the recognized scientific process; that obviously was not the case with
my 15,000-word investigative journalism series about the trial, which ran on Virology Blog in October of 2015. Anyone who now cites the PACE trial as evidence of the effectiveness of the CBT/GET paradigm also has an obligation to cite the peer-reviewed reanalysis that challenges the core findings........................
