A landmark study suggesting that ME could be treated with exercise and psychological intervention is seriously flawed, scientists have claimed.
If correct, it would mean that treatments recommended on the NHS, which have proved hugely controversial among Britain’s 250,000 sufferers of ME, are ineffective.
However, the study, which, since its publication in the Lancet, has been the focus of bitter dispute, has been defended by its authors and other scientists. The new analysis used the same data but a different definition for what constituted “recovery”. Philip Stark, professor of statistics at Berkeley, argued that this simple change converted a “finding into an unfinding” — showing that there was no benefit from exercise or cognitive behavioural therapy.
He conducted the re-analysis because he said the original