I was surprised to receive a request to publish a Spanish study I didn’t know about. This request came directly from someone in charge of one of the most widely known CFS/ME associations in my country, Spain.

You might know Spain has recently appeared in some lists as one of the countries that has done a significant amount of research about CFS/ME worldwide. Some of them are solid science and show concern about the disease, but I have to say most of them are just statistical studies or don’t get past the level of the one I’m discussing today.

Spain hasn’t kept up with the international level of the investigation on our disease, and if you think UK researchers and doctors are narrow-minded and insulated, Spain doesn’t seem to be far behind.

Here you can read in English a case study on 12 children — ME sufferers that are said to be in a “complete resolution” after 7 months of CBT and GET and the rest experienced “partial improvement”. Of course measurements for the recovery criteria is not included, but despite of that, I still was called a censurer once I told this important person I didn’t think exposing the kids with CFS/ME and their parents to this kind of information was a good idea after all the PACE trial concern.

I told this person GET and CBT have no scientific evidence of being a valid treatment for CFS/ME and also that the potential damage from these therapies keeps getting hidden.
The surprising response -No surprise in all of this until now- I got from this person was that they knew the clinicians in this study well, and they know they are not fond of PACE or the biopsychosocial theory and are helping a lot of children that are really desperate, and so I should not “censor” their study.

As you can see this doesn’t match well with the treatment given and so I told this person. “I’m not going to censor your friend’s study, I might as well publish it in a international environment so you can test if they, as you say, are up to all the objective advances in the science of CFS/ME”.

So here you go, patients with ME worldwide, check the Spanish case study report on CBT, GET and antidepressants in children that doesn’t follow the biopsychosocial model.

Click below to read the study!

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