Scrutable

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 18, 2021 9:05 pm

Remember Dr. Sarah Myhill? She who was the subject of complaints to the GMC about her extremely dodgy/woo-woo web site and medical practice by someone (I forget who, sorry) from the Bad Science forum?

Well, she's back... this time complaining to the GMC and the Information Commissioner's office about the PACE trial (a study of treatment of ME/CFS; this story has been running, in various forms, for close to 10 years now).

The amusing thing is, she seems to have a plausible case. I guess the ME/CFS community will take support from wherever they can get it. And David Marks, who is supporting her here, does not appear to be a crank.

The pacing that we recommend to patients is NOT the adaptive pacing used in the PACE trial. We recommend the self-administered treatment which has been shown by a number of unpublished patient surveys to be an effective method of minimizing the severity of the symptoms of ME/CFS [31]. Biologically, pacing is expected not to make symptoms worse because it minimizes tissue damage by the effects of overexertion. Regarding CBT and GET which are favoured by PACE, we know of no proven mechanism by which either can ameliorate, let alone rectify, mitochondrial dysfunction, and in fact excessive exercise can result in further tissue damage. Finally, we note that the outcome measures described by the PACE authors as “moderate” are in fact miniscule in comparison to the improvements that we measure in our biomedical tests.