Fraud involves an intent to make money or cause loss or risk of loss. So you would have to demonstrate that the manipulation was done to make money or cause loss or risk of loss.
I think that sums up the legal side of things, however scientific fraud is not always about legal issues. MMR vaccine and autism research by Wakefield was, rightly or wrongly, not a huge legal issue. It was a scientific issue, and resulted in severe damage to scientific reputation etc.
Fraud in a legal sense will be almost impossible to establish without a whistle-blower or some as yet unfound secret document that establishes the case. In other words its not going to be established on current evidence.
As I currently understand it any infraction on the scientific side is called scientific misconduct. Its the popular description by the public and press when they talk about fraud.
In scientific fraud, again my interpretation, there is intent to decieve.
The problem is that within psychogenic psychiatry, which might be considered a strong-psych subset of BPS, there is a huge grab bag of unreason, evidence-less conclusions, biased methods, biased analysis, etc., going back to the original claims of Charcot and Freud.
Charcot, were he alive today and out of his time, would be treated as a medical quack. Freud would be considered at least a quack, and possibly have to face other allegations, including drug abuse and fraud. He most definitely provided a very false report on Anna O.
Things just continued in bad form right up to the current day. Taken within the context of where psychogenic psychiatry has gone, then very little done by Wessely, White etc., can be considered to be outside the realm of established practice. This is not however an endorsement of the psychogenic proponents. It undermines the credibility of psychogenic psychiatry, which was never good anyway, and undermines any form of strong-psych biopsychosocial claims.
Using such cultural and authoritative claims gives rise to what I think is a justifiable analysis that psychogenic medicine needs to be taken out of medicine entirely and into the realm of pseudoscientific unproven claims.
Now as I have said, if we can get strong evidence of actual fraud, things which cannot have other interpretation and will stand up as evidence in legal settings, then things will change. Right now we do not have that evidence.
We do have oodles of evidence (oodles = technical term
), that the PACE trial is a kludge of bias and implication and has no place in the scientific record.