[cpncrunch]

>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.

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.

[eukaryote]

I did not imply the treatment had no benefit. I stated that one third got better, one third had no change, and one third got worse. This is not a good result - a third of the participants got worse.

In addition, 13% of the participants on the trial had already recovered before the trail began, but were not excluded.

Finally, the thresholds for being “recovered” demonstrated worse health than the scores required in the first place to demonstrate the severe disability needed to enter the trial. This anomaly meant that some participants could get worse on physical function and fatigue during the trial and still be included in the results as being “recovered.”

“I’m shocked that the Lancet published it,” said Ronald Davis, a well-known geneticist at Stanford University and the director of the scientific advisory board of the Open Medicine Foundation.

“The PACE study has so many flaws and there are so many questions you’d want to ask about it that I don’t understand how it got through any kind of peer review”, added Davis.

[cpncrunch]

>I did not imply the treatment had no benefit. I stated that one third got better, one third had no change, and one third got worse. This is not a good result - a third of the participants got worse.

Do you have a reference for that? Overall, patients got slightly better on average. Even if some got slightly worse, on average there was an overall benefit.

>In addition, 13% of the participants on the trial had already recovered before the trail began, but were not excluded.

That's incorrect. The physical function was just one measure. To be counted as recovered, patients needed to meet other criteria and it would have been impossible for patients to be recovered at baseline. This seems to be a piece of misinformation that is spreading around patient forums. You're better reading the study itself rather than other people's (perhaps flawed) interpretation of it.