>Second, setting a functional level on measure you're talking about is arbitrary
Yes, and the PACE recovery paper does say this.
>But the the PACE authors picked a very lo value for "recovery."
How exactly is 1sd below the mean of the general population "lo"?
>At the end, they defined "recovery" below the physical functioning level for most heart failure patients
Again, it's 1sd below the mean of the general population. Congestive heart failure has a mean value of physical functioning around 1sd below the mean for the general population. The person who first threw out this "congestive heart failure" meme probably didn't understand statistics.
>That is, a CFS patient could enter the trial, get worse, and get called recovered
The point is that the entry criteria was an upper limit and the recovery criteria was a lower limit, so it makes sense that they're different. I don't think you can have patients who didn't improve being classed as "recovered" as recovery also included various other measures (e.g. not meeting Oxford criteria). The main point of the study was to show the differences in recovery between the treatment groups.
The other point is that the recovery results weren't even in the PACE trial, they was in a second paper. The paper does mention that there is no agreed definition of recovery, and they were just trying to get a handle on it using various measures.
Overall, apart from the recovery results (which are somewhat arbitrary) the PACE trial results are in line with all the other CBT trials.
There are certainly problems with the PACE trial (the main one being that CBT and GET are based on dubious etiologies), so I think CFS advocates would be better off actually delving into the real problems with the treatments, rather than putting up these strawmen.
Yes, and the PACE recovery paper does say this.
>But the the PACE authors picked a very lo value for "recovery."
How exactly is 1sd below the mean of the general population "lo"?
>At the end, they defined "recovery" below the physical functioning level for most heart failure patients
Again, it's 1sd below the mean of the general population. Congestive heart failure has a mean value of physical functioning around 1sd below the mean for the general population. The person who first threw out this "congestive heart failure" meme probably didn't understand statistics.
>That is, a CFS patient could enter the trial, get worse, and get called recovered
The point is that the entry criteria was an upper limit and the recovery criteria was a lower limit, so it makes sense that they're different. I don't think you can have patients who didn't improve being classed as "recovered" as recovery also included various other measures (e.g. not meeting Oxford criteria). The main point of the study was to show the differences in recovery between the treatment groups.
The other point is that the recovery results weren't even in the PACE trial, they was in a second paper. The paper does mention that there is no agreed definition of recovery, and they were just trying to get a handle on it using various measures.
Overall, apart from the recovery results (which are somewhat arbitrary) the PACE trial results are in line with all the other CBT trials.
There are certainly problems with the PACE trial (the main one being that CBT and GET are based on dubious etiologies), so I think CFS advocates would be better off actually delving into the real problems with the treatments, rather than putting up these strawmen.