Tag: PACE

A Broader Picture

The last draft post I wrote about the MEGA petition was superseded by events before I finished it, so I’ll try and crack on with this one before the same thing happens again. Of course ‘cracking on’ in ME terms is still kind of slow but I’ll see if I can break the tortoise barrier.

So, what’s happened recently?

Well, we’ve been told that Peter White is retiring from research and will only be an ‘advisor’ to MEGA from now on. This perspective appears to be endorsed by the latest list of MEGA personnel, which no longer includes him. I can only give a muted ‘hurrah’ to this one. Advice is dangerous stuff and you can still do a lot of damage with it. His PACE Trial is swiftly becoming a watchword for bad science (see here, here, and here). Is he really the sort of ME ‘expert’ that either we patients or the MEGA team want around to guide this latest project?

It really is astonishing that MEGA apparently do still want him around after all he has done, and that they clearly expect patients to put up with it. It seems to me that if a passing Martian was given a brief course in English and the full facts, then even he (or she) would swiftly understand why we don’t want Prof White anywhere near this project. Why do the MEGA team not get this?

People with ME have  been left on the scrapheap for decades. I myself have been ill for over thirty years. That’s over half my life. I have no children because of it. I lost my job. My life is very limited. Yet I am one of the relatively lucky ones. I can sit and tap at this keyboard – as long as I take plenty of rests to fend off the shoulder and eye pain and overall exhaustion. There are plenty of others who have to spend all their lives in bed, who can’t stand the light, who can’t even talk to their loved ones. We’ve all heard about Whitney Defoe whose birthday it recently was. He is not alone in his suffering. The vast majority of the severely ill are left to fend for themselves as best they can. Rarely do doctors come near them and they wouldn’t know what to do if they did.

And all this time, all these decades, so little research has been done, in large part because of the fairy story dreamed up by the PACE researchers and their associates: the fairy story that Continue reading “A Broader Picture”

MEGA Update

Here’s the latest from the MEGA petition site:

3 Oct 2016 — Two members of the Alliance have retired from the group: Simon Collins, University of Bristol, will be changing universities; Prof Peter White, Queen Mary University, London, is retiring from research at the end of this year and will have an advisory role.

We will be launching a series of blogs this week from MEGA members outlining why they joined MEGA and what their expertise and field/discipline has to offer.

Which doesn’t seem to me to make a whole lot of difference unfortunately. It does make you wonder why, after the PACE trial, anyone running a research study would want to take advice from Peter White… And Esther Crawley remains involved. The other day, at the CMRC conference, she was seeking to justify her use of GET on children by saying there is ‘good evidence that it works for adults’. It doesn’t seem like she’s paying much attention to the recent slippage in the reputation of PACE.

Previous posts related to MEGA:

MEGA Petition

Unsigning

Barefaced

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.

 Note: I’ve been asked to include details of ‘unsigning’ in case you previously signed the MEGA petition and wish to un-sign pending further information about the study. I covered it here

Unsigning

Thanks to AndyPR for this information about how to ‘unsign’ from the MEGA petition if you signed but are now having second thoughts due to the involvement of Profs White & Crawley etc.

“If people have signed this Mega Research Project Petition …unaware of the PACE exponents’ involvement …if they wish to UNSIGN pending further clarification of patient selection criteria, data sharing protocols, and exactly how the PACE experts are involved in the study…..
Go to your confirmation e.mail and press the “didn’t sign” text box and that will remove your name.

“If you have lost or deleted the original email confirmation, you can also fill in a form on the Change org web page and request to be removed. They will do so and confirm it.”

White In Denial

We’ve had to put up with decades of nonsense about ME in the press but today’s Guardian article by Peter White of the PACE Trial has to be the worst I’ve seen. It wasn’t easy to leave a comment on the article while shaking with anger but I did my best. Here’s what I wrote. I’m pleased to say that many others were making powerful points at he same time.

Following the recent release of data from Peter White’s PACE trial (by order of a Freedom of Information tribunal, £250,000 having been spent in attempting to stop it) PACE has finally been revealed as the travesty of the truth it always has been. Rather than give the appropriate heartfelt apology, however, Prof White continues in denial.

The blog to which he disparagingly refers was written by patients who have used energy they can ill afford to spend in a David-and-Goliath struggle to reveal the truth about this reprehensible study. With the aid of expert statisticians they have not distorted the figures, as Prof White implies. What they have done is to use the newly released data to analyse the results in line with the trial’s original protocol, which White and his fellow authors originally declared they would use but then changed their minds as it didn’t give them the outcomes they wanted. They never gave a satisfactory explanation for this change but it now seems pretty obvious why it happened. The newly reanalysed results show that GET and CBT are of no more use than a placebo. They are worthless for ME/CFS, but White and his associates refuse to admit it as they have built their life’s work on these therapies. Therapies which, moreover, have been shown to be harmful for patients with ME/CFS in numerous surveys. Patients have ended up housebound or bedbound for years on end because of the efforts of White & Co, but still they refuse to admit they have done anything wrong.

This change of protocol was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study’s shortcomings. The Criteria used to select subjects for the study included patients with other fatigue conditions; the numerous changes in protocol meant that patients could be ill enough to join the study, deteriorate during it, yet still be classed as ‘recovered’ at the end; objective outcome measures which actually measured patients’ abilities were abandoned in favour of questionnaires; conflicts of interest on the part of the investigators were not disclosed to study participants, the list goes on and on…. In years to come, PACE will be used as an example of how NOT to conduct a research study.

 

P.S. The most complete analysis of the many shortcomings of the PACE trial is by David Tuller. The article, Trial By Error,  is in several parts. There are links to all of them here. If you just read the summary though, at the opening of part one, that tells you a lot.

MEGA Petition

Here is a copy of an email from Leeds ME Network sent to Sonya Chowdhury, CEO of Action for ME concerning the petition which she has been circulating regarding the proposed ‘big data’ study by the UK CFS/M.E. Research Collaborative. It is another situation, similar to the NIH study in the US – where the research sounds very promising but some of the personnel involved sound alarm bells. Leeds ME Network are therefore requesting more details and – hopefully – reassurances.

Dear Sonya – I am writing because I find it difficult to know how to respond to the MEGA petition which you have been promoting. Of course I am in favour of more biomedical research into ME. Normally I would sign this petition, circulate it to our members, and publicise it more widely on social media. Yet I am concerned about the presence of  Profs White and Crawley in the MEGA team. I am sure you are aware that many other patients share my reservations.

Following the recent release of data, it is now clear that Prof White and his PACE team deliberately manipulated the data to get the result they wanted, thereby deceiving patients, doctors, and decision makers both in this country and worldwide, Action for ME included. I know that your predecessor, Sir Peter Spencer, expressed surprise at the results of the PACE Trial. Well he might have done, because it is now clear that the published results were a travesty of the truth.

As for Prof Crawley, as you will be aware she is now about to test GET on children in the MAGENTA trial (in spite of widespread concerns about the PACE trial plus substantial reporting by patients of harms from this therapy), has recently been testing the quack therapy the Lightning Process on children, and has added to the substantial body of misinformation about ME by conducting a study of the prevalence of CFS at age 16 by using subjects who were ‘diagnosed’ by questionnaire and without the involvement of doctors.

In view of these issues. I’m afraid I have no confidence in any research involving either Profs White or Crawley and am therefore loath to sign or distribute the petition. But on the other hand, I would very much like to support biomedical research. I therefore feel I am caught between a rock and a hard place and it seems that many other patients feel the same.

I notice that ME Research UK have put a slightly different list on their web site: a ‘main MEGA team’ which does not include Profs White and Crawley. This makes perfect sense, as it is hard to see why either of them, given their skill sets and the nature of their previous work, should be involved in biomedical research anyway. So I wonder if their presence on the petition page is a token one only, acknowledging their membership of the Research Collaborative perhaps? If this were the case, if Profs White and Crawley were not actually to be involved in the big data project (and therefore not at liberty to subvert it), I might well feel able to support and publicise the petition. I wonder if you are able to advise me on this or else pass this email on to someone else who can?

I have just being listening to your presentation at the Research Collaborative conference in which you spoke very tellingly of the need for an appropriate level of funding for ME research. I am grateful to you for making this case and am sorry if you feel that I – and perhaps others – are ‘shooting ourselves in the foot’ by expressing such reservations about who is in charge of research. But experience has taught us that bad research is even worse than no research. The efforts of Prof White and the biopsychosocial school have been one of the main factors in reducing investment in biomedical research in recent years. It has taken patients many years – and a lot of energy we could ill afford to spend – to get to the stage where we are finally starting to expose the PACE Trial for the sham that it is. We cannot afford for the same thing to happen again.

 Note: I’ve been asked to include details of ‘unsigning’ in case you previously signed the MEGA petition and wish to un-sign pending further information about the study. I covered it here

The Light of Day

After long opposition (and substantial expense) from the trial investigators and Queen Mary University of London, data from the £5m publicly funded PACE Trial, which studied graded exercise (GET) and CBT therapies for ME/CFS, has finally been released under the Freedom of Information Act. ME patients Alem Matthees, Tom Kindlon and Carly Maryhew, with the support of two prominent US statisticians, have reanalysed the data according to the original trial protocol and illustrated that the recovery results were exaggerated by a factor of four due to unexplained protocol changes. The revised results were in fact statistically insignificant. This means that , in spite of what the investigators claimed, the trial provided no proof that GET and CBT help people with ME/CFS to recover.

Though those who have studied the trial have long suspected that the results as originally presented were grossly misleading, it is still a “gosh- wow” moment to actually witness the proof of this. One is tempted to ask “How did they think they would get away with what appears to be such a deliberate attempt to mislead?”

The answer appears to be that they calculated quite cleverly: they almost did get away with it. The professional reputation of the investigators had led many prominent people to assume that they must be in the right, and that the ME patients who have been fighting to expose the truth (whom the PACE investigators branded as ‘a fairly small, but highly organised, very vocal and very damaging group of individuals’) were unreliable obsessives, eager to discredit the trial simply because its conclusions did not agree with their own beliefs about ME. (In actual fact, the attempt to besmirch the patients in this way appears to have been a classic case of ‘projection’, the investigators having apparently twisted the figures to fit their own mistaken beliefs about the condition.)

Even now, it seems likely that they will stick to the strategy of claiming that black is white and relying on their reputations to Continue reading “The Light of Day”

Out of the Blue

Well, I seem to have gone into PEM at the moment – due to too much blogging amongst other things. Fortunately I have a post for ME Awareness Month which I prepared earlier. In it, I have tried to describe how it can feel to be suddenly stricken down with this devastating condition. Please take a few minutes to read it, especially if you know very little about ME. It is not an easy illness to understand unless you have it yourself or are close to someone who does – and even then it can be bewildering. I have tried to open a small window on the experience of trying to adjust to this unwelcome visitor. (And if you’ve been wondering what PEM is, you’re about to find out…)

One day you start feeling ill. You don’t think very much about it at first. It’s just a bug and bugs go away, don’t they? But at the end of a week you’re not feeling any better. You wonder how long this is going to take. You’re getting a bit alarmed.

At the end of a fortnight, you’re positively worried. You have to phone work yet again to tell them you’re still not well. There’s a growing pressure to explain yourself but you’re just as baffled as everyone else. Your body’s supposed to repair itself, so why’s it not happening?

You also have to explain yourself to your family. They want to know when you’ll be well again. There are things to do that you can’t put on hold forever. Could you give them some idea of when you’ll be up to speed again? This illness of yours is getting inconvenient.

So you go to the doctor, hoping that he will know, but he doesn’t seem to have any more idea than you do. He gives you a sick note but even that seems grudging. Even he seems to think you ought to be fixing yourself by now. But isn’t that his job?

You try to start doing more – but the more you do, the worse you feel. You’re weak and in pain and something feels poisoned inside you. You’re starting to think that something is seriously wrong. Continue reading “Out of the Blue”

Door to Freedom Revisited

Following my earlier post about the tenuous argument put forward for the recent PACE Trial Freedom of Information Act refusal, I’ve been digging a bit deeper and I think it is now absolutely clear that the ‘evidence’ cited in the refusal notice totally fails to support QMUL’s case. It also appears that it has been deliberately quoted out of context by QMUL to create a misleading impression.

Just to remind you, here is my summary of the argument used for refusing the request:

“The argument seems to go like this: in spite of the fact that this specific request is not onerous and in spite of the fact that the complainant has not previously made an FOI request, he has been adjudged to be part of a coordinated campaign to discredit PACE (because he has talked to other people about PACE on the internet). Therefore the issue has been judged not on this specific request but on the overall burden of PACE-related FOI requests on QMUL, which are accepted not to be overwhelming but have nevertheless caused ‘disproportionate irritation and stress’ to Prof White and his team and are therefore vexatious. Therefore the request for this important piece of information is refused.”

What got me looking at things more closely was this comment by Chrisb on the Phoenix Rising forum in response to my post:

“Mr Spoonseeker has referred to and dealt with the point about the sheer weight of requests but I think there is another point.

“The Guidance apparently states that “if a public authority has reason to believe that several different requesters are acting in concert as part of a campaign to disrupt the organisation by virtue of the sheer weight of FOIA requests being submitted……”

“This guidance appears to be primarily, and quite reasonably, directed at and applicable to an entirely different type of campaign where the object is to bring about the disruption of the organisation, rather than a bona fide attempt to obtain information. Has any evidence been presented with the purpose of demonstrating that the requesters intent was disruption of the organisation of QMUL rather than obtaining the information which we believe to be the real object of the request?

“Given the Commissioner’s acceptance that this particular request on its own would not impose a significant burden, the onus of proof to establish whether the person was acting in concert with others, whose intent was disruption, ought to be significantly higher.

“In order to show that the request constituted part of a campaign one might expect it to be necessary to adduce evidence of a campaign predating the request. It seems to me that the examples quoted by QMUL probably were made after the request and in response to the initial refusal. Alternatively one might attempt to show a link to subsequent requests, but as I recall it there was no such attempt.”

In actual fact I had attempted to deal with most of this issue in my earlier post as follows: Continue reading “Door to Freedom Revisited”

Closing the Door on Freedom

OK, here’s my take on the Freedom of Information Refusal Notice which came out a couple of days ago, not to be confused with the Tribunal outcome which (as I write) is expected imminently. Apologies for the fact that it’s about twice as long as it should be but I now have brain fog so I don’t have the intellect to edit it down! If you manage to read it, I hope you find it of interest. Me, I’m going to get some sleep….

The latest PACE Trial Freedom of Information Refusal Notice causes particular concern, not only for the PACE Trial and its implications for the future prospects of people with ME/CFS, but also for the Freedom of Information Act itself – and even for freedom of speech. The Notice incorporates twelve pages of repetitive arguments from QMUL (Queen Mary University of London, home of the PACE Trial) and three pages of what seem to me to be concise and clearly argued response from ‘the complainant’ (i.e. the guy who has made the request for information). Unfortunately, the Commissioner then goes on to reject the latter in favour of the former, apparently believing every word that QMUL have told him, i.e. that patients have launched a concerted campaign to discredit the PACE Trial by submitting a burdensome number of FOI requests in the desperate hope of finding something wrong with it and in the meantime bringing Lead PACE Investigator Prof Peter White and his staff to their knees under the resultant administrative load so that they aren’t able to do any more of their vital research. Or something like that. Their evidence is not so much a linear argument as a trip several times round the houses in the hope that if they say the same things often enough, some of them will eventually convince the Commissioner. Unfortunately, this strategy appears to have been successful.

The information the complainant requested relates to the data from the step test, an objective outcome measure which went unreported in the original PACE report but appeared in the form of a small scale graph in an appendix to one of the follow up studies. Continue reading “Closing the Door on Freedom”