MAGICAL MEDICINE: HOW TO MAKE AN ILLNESS ... - Invest in ME

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In January 2003 the wife of Richard Senior died of ME/CFS; the North Wales Coroner entered CFS as the
cause of death on the death certificate.
On 4 th July 2005 Casey Fero died of ME/CFS at the age of 23 in the US. The autopsy showed viral infection of
the heart muscle. The pathologist was shocked at the state of Casey’s heart, which showed fibrosis
indicating the presence of a long‐standing infection.
In November 2005 Sophia Mirza died of ME/CFS in the UK and the death certificate of 19 th June 2006 gives
CFS as the cause of death, with acute renal failure.
Another UK death from ME/CFS occurred in May 2008 when a severely affected and courageous woman
died in the North of England; her death certificate gives “Myalgic encephalomyelitis” as the cause of death.
Evidence from autopsies of people who have died from ME/CFS is chilling. In Sophia Mirza’s case (a 32
year old woman sectioned by psychiatrists who alleged that she was suffering from a mental disorder so she
was kept in a locked ward and, according to her mother’s evidence, denied basic care), there was evidence
of severe inflammation throughout 75% of her spinal cord. This was one of three such autopsies spoken
about by Dr Abhijit Chaudhuri at the Royal Society of Medicine meeting on 11 th July 2009 (see below).
A 2005 autopsy in the US showed oedema of the lower limbs; the alveolar spaces of the lungs were filled
with inflammatory cells and there were small emboli scattered throughout the arteries; there was marked
congestion of the liver and spleen; the bowel was ischaemic; there was mild inflammation of the kidneys;
there was also evidence of rhabdomyolysis (the breakdown of muscle fibres resulting in the release of
muscle fibre contents into the circulation, some of which are toxic to the kidney); the bladder showed a
hyperplastic epithelium; the thyroid showed colloid filled follicles, with scattered dystrophic calcifications
and calcification of the small arterial walls; the right occipital lobe of the brain showed areas of degeneration
and degenerated astrocytes, and the white matter surrounding this defect appeared puckered.
The Medical Director of The National CFIDS Foundation (chronic fatigue immune dysfunction, a
commonly‐used US term for ME/CFS), Dr Alan Cocchetto, commented: “Every time you look closely at
someone with this disease, you see immense suffering. There appears to be no limit as to the human toll
that this disease is capable of exerting on patients” (http://www.ncf‐net.org/forum/Autopsy.htm).
The Wessely School, however, including the three PACE Trial Principal Investigators and the Director of the
Clinical Trial Unit, continue to believe that ME/CFS is an “aberrant illness belief” and they assume that all
patients – including those with ME/CFS ‐‐ suffering from what they deem to be “medically unexplained
symptoms” (which they refer to as MUS) or from “medically unexplained physical symptoms” (which they
refer to as MUPS) are really suffering from the same mental illness, ie. somatisation, and as such their
symptoms will never be medically explained, therefore there is no point in wasting health service resources
in seeking a biomedical explanation.
The Wessely School claim that they are reacting against Cartesian dualism – the long‐held belief in Western
medicine that an illness is either “organic” or “psychiatric”. However, as Dr Mary Schweitzer (a US ME/CFS
sufferer and patient advocate) points out, the Wessely School has simply turned Cartesian dualism on its
head. Disorders such as schizophrenia used to be regarded as “mental”, but advances in understanding now
show that the psychiatric disturbances that present in schizophrenia are manifestations of underlying
organic pathology. In their own interpretation, the Wessely School has reversed this in relation to ME/CFS,
claiming that the physical is psychological which hardly accords with 21 st century medicine
(http://www.hhs.gov/advcomcfs/meetings/presentations/schweitzer_0509.pdf ).