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From what I recall, the result of the PACE trail was a bit of a farce. There were 3 categories of outcome for the patient: no change, better, or worse. Each of these categories contains roughly a third of the subjects. Despite such a glaring failure to produce a useful treatment, the PR spin focused on the third that got better, rather than the third of patients who got worse after the PACE treatment. Surely this kind of breaks the medical tradition of "first, do no harm". The anger generated by ME patients in the UK was caused by the fact that it was proposed they would lose their benefits if they did not participate on a PACE treatment, a treatment that caused no improvement or made ME patients worse in 66% of the trail subjects. A more open mind must be taken by researchers when approaching ME as a illness. They must remember they are dealing with subjects that have frequently dismissed as lazy, over-sensitive, and in many cases lying about their symptoms. Disclaimer: I had ME for 2.5 years about 25 years ago, so I have been subject to family, doctors, friends and even strangers dismissing my muscle pain, blinding headaches, insomnia, continuous cramps and inability to regulate my body temperature as "all in the mind". I wish anyone reading this who is suffering from ME all my best wishes - I remember clearly how ME feels. I am now a healthy 45 year old man, who can now play tennis for 4-5 hours continuously without ill effect. There can be a future after ME for all of us if medical researchers continue to search for a solution, rather than classifying it as "all in the mind" as the PACE trail was seemingly intended. |
I'm not sure where you got that info. I just had a look at the 2011 and 2013 papers, and didn't see that. You're implying that treatment had no benefit, but that's definitely not what they found. If you look at the results, you'll see that CBT and GET did result in an improvement in the average scores of patients. It wasn't a huge improvement, but it certainly was an improvement.