Regarding Lerner: can someone confirm what exactly he did? I don't have access to the full-text, so this analysis might be flawed, but bear with me. Searching on pubmed for "cfs Valacyclovir" brings up 2 results - PMID 18019402 and PMID 12582420. One is an initial study and the other is a follow-up. Assuming they are talking about the same study (which might be incorrect, as I can't tell for sure) it looks like Lerner has a very odd idea what 'placebo control' means. If you read the initial study you'll see that both the treatment AND control group received the treatment - the difference was simply that one group had different infections. It doesn't say it was double blind, so presumably the patients were told which infections they had (and this certainly can influence the results). In the initial study he just talks about 'controls', but in the follow-up he says the study was 'blinded-random placebo-controlled trial. You certainly couldn't call a study 'placebo controlled' if you give the treatment to both groups! So are these different studies? Does anyone have the full-text?