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PACE trial claims of recovery are not justified by the data: A Rejoinder to Sharpe et al.

Wolfiness

Activity Level 0
Messages
482
Location
UK
I really start to think what drives people like White, Wessely, Chalder e.a. what are their intensions?
Is it fame? Is it money? Is it prestige? Is it arrogance? Or are they really delusional

Wessely's obsession is with the 2nd class status / stigmatisation of psychiatry. He has thus invented a disorder that is somatisation par excellence, where psych sufferers in denial have somatised not just symptoms but a whole disease. It is the apotheosis of his preoccupations. The enraged-patients-in-denial are intrinsic to the architecture of his delusion.
 
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anciendaze

Senior Member
Messages
1,841
Not knowing Sir Simon Wesseley personally I can only conjecture about his motivations. What I can say is that there is a known case in which threats really do take place -- when you are dealing with paranoid schizophrenics. This is a class of mental patient he does deal with, and from an encounter with one such in a context quite distinct from this forum, I can testify that such people do make remarkable threats, and can create serious legal problems. Treatment of schizophrenics with paranoid processes is about as unsatisfactory as anything in medicine. This is not a psychiatric success story.

Lumping ME/CFS patients in with that diagnosis seems to indicate a serious weakness of remote diagnosis, if any more was needed. Incidentally, there is evidence that even these patients do show abnormal biochemistry. (I would like to know how many have antibodies to NMDA receptors, just as an example.) We even know of a case in which a mentally-healthy leukemia patient needing a bone marrow transplant taken from a schizophrenic brother became severely schizophrenic as a result. In another case, a female schizophrenic was treated to reduce autoimmune activity. She became lucid just before she died. There are real problems separating objective changes causing this illness from results of disease or treatment, especially when the patient's paranoia centers on medical personnel, as is often the case.

Even collecting samples from mental patients is a problem. One page of results from testing urine samples seen in research had a handwritten note next to one result saying "ginger ale".
 

CCC

Senior Member
Messages
457
I've known scientists who can see their careers crumbling in the face of a new theory with data to support it.

Hate is not the word. It is too personal.

Contempt, arrogance and desperation would be closer, from when I've seen it in others. And mainly desperation.
 

Art Vandelay

Senior Member
Messages
470
Location
Australia
\Incidentally, there is evidence that even these patients do show abnormal biochemistry. (I would like to know how many have antibodies to NMDA receptors, just as an example.) We even know of a case in which a mentally-healthy leukemia patient needing a bone marrow transplant taken from a schizophrenic brother became severely schizophrenic as a result. In another case, a female schizophrenic was treated to reduce autoimmune activity. She became lucid just before she died.

An antibiotic, minocycline, has led to improvement and even cured some people with schizophrenia. It looks like there's a trial underway in the UK: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...eviate-symptoms-of-schizophrenia-7469121.html

If it works and if PACE implodes, Wessely's client base will be reduced significantly. No wonder he's so desperate.
 

Sean

Senior Member
Messages
7,378
Wessely is just a megalomaniac, but unfortunately a very persistent and successful one, highly skilled at dressing up his power grab in pseudo-scientific, pseudo-compassionate rhetoric. Almost Svengali-like in his ability to sway an audience, independent of the substance of his case.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
While in many ways I agree with the above posts, I question if speculating on White et al's motives or disorders repeatedly on various threads is useful.
It both is repetitive, dilutes actual criticisms of the papers, and leads to assumptions from the casual reader that it's just hate-based.
 

Sean

Senior Member
Messages
7,378
Understanding your opponent's motives and mindset is a distinct advantage.

Even granting that they entered the field with the best of intentions – and I think with Wessely in particular, that is highly contestable – but even granting that, it clearly didn't stay that way as the evidence stacked up against their hypothesis and approach (which it was doing from fairly early on), and they resorted to increasingly ridiculous, offensive, and illegitimate means to deny that and suppress it.

For the best part of three decades they consistently chose to place their egos, reputations, careers, empires, status, and – let's be blunt – not inconsiderable incomes above the science and the welfare of their patients, and they were increasingly ruthless and underhanded about it.

Understanding their motives and mindset is an important part of finding out what happened, handing out appropriate accountability, and learning from it so we can try to prevent it happening again.

These people deserve no respect or quarter. They gave us none.
 

Solstice

Senior Member
Messages
641
Understanding your opponent's motives and mindset is a distinct advantage.

Even granting that they entered the field with the best of intentions – and I think with Wessely in particular, that is highly contestable – but even granting that, it clearly didn't stay that way as the evidence stacked up against their hypothesis and approach (which it was doing from fairly early on), and they resorted to increasingly ridiculous, offensive, and illegitimate means to deny that and suppress it.

For the best part of three decades they consistently chose to place their egos, reputations, careers, empires, status, and – let's be blunt – not inconsiderable incomes above the science and the welfare of their patients, and they were increasingly ruthless and underhanded about it.

Understanding their motives and mindset is an important part of finding out what happened, handing out appropriate accountability, and learning from it so we can try to prevent it happening again.

These people deserve no respect or quarter. They gave us none.

While I do agree they deserve no respect or quarter, there's something to be said for sticking to what we can verify as facts. Those reflect poorly enough on them as it is, and that's the stick we should be beating them with. Resorting to assumptions about their personality traits don't help us in my opinion, however warranted they may be.