The last draft post I wrote about the MEGA petition was superseded by events before I finished it, so I’ll try and crack on with this one before the same thing happens again.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”
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.