Some articles on ME/CFS are ignorant, but @nataliesurely‘s @newrepublic piece last month is so shockingly bad, so suffused with CBT/GET Brigade rhetoric that it’s hard not to believe it’s an exercise in bad faith. 1/7
The familiar tropes are all there, from the suggestion patients disparage mental health disorders and turn to illness because it gives them identity to misleading descriptions of what PACE offers and represents. 2/7
One line particularly stuck in my craw, though: “Considering PACE’s ultimately rather mundane finding, the tenacity of the response [from pts] is quite surprising.” The line implies unreasoned outrage on the part of patients. 3/7
But it also obscures a truth its author surely knows (or should), that PACE is more than a study. It’s a regime, one which not only seeks to deny medical treatment (and research!) of patients’ symptoms, but holds them responsible for the failure of the therapy. 4/7
PACE operates on the assumption pts’ symptoms are driven by fear of activity and the resulting deconditioning. Pts can be cured by right thought (CBT) and exercise (GET). (Which aren’t, btw, how they’re used in other illnesses, as the author allows @profmsharpe to imply). 5/7
If the therapy worked, pts would take it. But it doesn’t (see PACE) and when it doesn’t, patients lose access to clinical care, job & school accommodations, welfare & disability services, and even social support, as loved ones conclude they aren’t trying to get better. 6/7
PACE isn’t supplementary. It’s a regime that expects pts to exercise themselves out of wheelchairs and labels them malingerers when they can’t or won’t. To imply pt criticism of it is hysterical, while ignoring its destructive impacts is either very ignorant or very shitty. 7/7
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