Barefaced

Over the past 48 hours, many patients have been expressing concern about the involvement of Prof Peter White in the proposed MEGA biomedical ‘big data’ study of ME/CFS. It seems extraordinary that someone who believes in the simplistic ‘fear-avoidance’ model of ME/CFS should even wish to be involved in this study. Of what relevance is psychiatry to genomics?

Then, yesterday, came a timely reminder of why we can’t allow Prof White anywhere near this project. His Guardian article in defence of PACE was an extraordinary illustration of a) his refusal to accept the truth about his fatally flawed research and b) his determination to say whatever it takes to try to defend the trial, however much deceit this may involve.

It has long been obvious to those who have studied PACE that the trial involved blatant trickery, juggling outcome measures to produce the results they wanted, but these deceits were not always obvious to those unschooled in statistics and/or without the time to sit down and read through the details. Just recently, however, as the whole PACE edifice comes closer to collapse, the lies seem to be getting both more desperate and more transparent. Yesterday’s article contains a real transparent whopper, but I’ll work through the piece in order, saving the whopper for last:

• White dismissively mentions an earlier post which claimed that sexism was part of the cause of ME patients’ mistreatment. He must surely be aware, however, that McEvedy and Beard, the two psychiatrists who first claimed ME to be a ‘hysterical’ condition cited ‘the high attack rate in females compared with males’ as part of their argument. Sexism therefore certainly played a part in the emergence of the PACE authors’ view of the condition.
• White goes on to make several mentions of ‘fear’ among patients. “The idea of exercise was scary for some patients” he writes, though he seems to have forgotten his own 2005 study which demonstrated that “CFS patients without a comorbid psychiatric disorder do not have an exercise phobia”.
• White speaks disparagingly of the newspaper articles which followed the various PACE announcements, accepting that headlines such as “just get out and exercise, say scientists” were harmful and misleading. At the time, however, he and his fellow PACE authors did little or nothing to try to correct such coverage. Furthermore, these very articles were written by journalists who had been briefed by the Science Media Centre, the shadowy organisation purporting to support “balance” in science reporting, which in turn was briefed by the PACE authors themselves and their associates.
• White continues to quote his figure of 22% for ‘recovery’ in patients receiving GET or CBT, making clear that by ‘recovery’ he really means ‘remission’. (This was another sleight of hand. White and his fellow authors failed to correct media reports which – not unreasonably – assumed that ‘recovery’ meant ‘recovery’). Yet those of us who have been following the PACE saga know that the 22% result no longer stands. Alem Matthees, Tom Kindlon and their colleagues have shown in their reanalysis that the true result is only 7% for CBT and 4% for GET, a statistically insignificant outcome, being scarcely above the 3% figure for standard medical care which everyone on the trial received anyway (including those on CBT and GET.)

This leads on to the whopper, for White gives the impression in the Guardian article that Matthees and his team got their result by playing around with the figures. The implication is that this was a fiddle. In actual fact, of course, Matthees used the original trial protocol which White and his colleagues had said they would use but changed when (we can only assume) it failed to give them the results they wanted. Yes, there was fiddling going on, but it wasn’t Matthees that was doing it.

White must know that Matthees was using the original protocol. This was explicitly why Matthees requested the data – because White and his team had protested they didn’t have time to do the calculations themselves. White must have sat through – or at least paid close attention to – the Freedom of Information Tribunal which issued the order to release the data. It can’t have escaped his attention that it had been requested specifically to reanalyse the figures according to the PACE authors’ own original protocol. Yet in the Guardian article, White gave the impression that Matthees and his team had simply been making random tweaks to fiddle the figures. The only possible explanation for why he wrote it like that was to deliberately mislead Guardian readers. He must have known better. He did know better. He was telling a barefaced lie to try to save his reputation.

I’m sorry. A man who will do something like that is not to be trusted. It is totally unreasonable for the ME organisations who are supposed to be protecting patients’ interests to think it is OK for him to be involved in an important piece of biomedical research into this illness. Why they even talk to him any longer is beyond me. It is high time we move on from PACE – and move on from Peter White. We’re really suffering here. We deserve better.