Both Medscape and The Times now have the article.
You can log in to The TImes to view it:
https://login.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoU...ord-expert-to-stop-research-into-me-ttnb8gznv
Carol Binks has written an excellent comment which she has shared on FB, but it hasn't shown up in the comments' section.
My comment is under the name of P Tilley, the account holder.
This is my comment.
Michael Sharpe has “stopped his work on chronic fatigue syndrome because of online abuse.” Really?
His PACE Trial recommends CBT/GET (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy/Graded Exercise Therapy) as an effective treatment, but the US CDC has, since, removed CBT/GET from its recommendations for treatment, stating that Graded Exercise may cause harm. The US AHRQ has recommended that the Oxford Criteria, used to recruit people to the PACE Trial, be retired. Scientists from the Workwell Foundation have published a letter for ME/CFS Healthcare Providers on their website (
workwellfoundation.org) saying that GET “not only fails to improve function, but is detrimental to the health of patients and should not be recommended.”
The Board of the US Open Medicine Foundation End ME/CFS Project, led by Prof. Ron Davis, includes 2 Nobel Laureates and 6 National Academy of Sciences members. Prof. Davis is a signatory to the letter to the Lancet, calling for an independent review of PACE, which he has called “a classic bad study.”
QMUL spent over £200,000 in a failed attempt to prevent the PACE Trial data from being released. As is their wont, the researchers tried to use the possibility of threats from “young men, borderline sociopathic or psychopathic” as an excuse not to release the data. The Commissioner of the FOI Tribunal concluded that these claims were “grossly exaggerated” as the only evidence that the researchers could come up with was that one of them had once been heckled at a Seminar.
Amongst all of this are the patients, many of whom have reported serious harm from CBT/GET, which is designed to counter the patients’ “unhelpful fear avoidance beliefs, leading to avoidance of activity”, a theory rejected by biomedical researchers around the world, with the Chief of the US CDC’s Chronic Viral Diseases Branch, which houses the ME/CFS Program, saying: “ME/CFS is a biological illness, not a psychological disorder .... These patients have a variety of abnormalities that affect multiple symptoms such as: Immune and neuroendocrine; Cellular metabolism; and Autonomic system regulating blood pressure and heart rate.” (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: It’s Real and We Can Do Better).
In January, more than 40 MPs passed a motion, in a Parliamentary Debate in the House of Commons, to support increased funding into biomedical research for ME. The stories from their Constituents were heart-rending, not least those of children being removed from their families for months and made to engage in exercise therapy. (See Hansard - Appropriate ME Treatment - 24 January 2019).
I think Professor James C. Coyne summed up the situation quite well in his tweet, yesterday, which said “Of course, the researcher quit because of trolls and not because he cannot get refunded. Not because doubts have been raised about the validity of his work. And not because reanalyses of his work come to different conclusions.”