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

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“CFS/ME” on State benefits and as a corollary, to reduce payments by insurance companies to those with
ME/CFS.
Wessely School psychiatrists are not neurologists, immunologists, neuroendocrine experts, vascular
medicine experts, or nuclear medicine experts, all of which are outside their area of expertise, so how do
they justify their involvement with and catchment of patients whose disease processes affect multiple
organs and systems, given that they are not qualified to investigate or explain complex diseases for which
there is as yet no definitive diagnostic test? Indeed, Wessely is on public record boasting that he does not
understand immunology: at his Gresham College lecture on 25 th January 2006 (“Something old, something
new, something borrowed, something blue: the true story of Gulf War Syndrome”), he stated about the
immunology of Gulf War Syndrome: “This is going a bit beyond me here”
(http://gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=0&EventId=448). Indeed, two years earlier, on 10 th August 2004 in
his evidence to the Lord Lloyd of Berwick Independent Inquiry into Gulf War Illnesses, when discussing
immunology and the shift from Th1 to Th2 (as has been shown to occur in ME/CFS also), Wessely said:
“Now, please do not ask me what that means because I do not really know. A man has got to know his limitations and
my limitations are immunology” (www.lloyd‐gwii.com/admin/ManagedFiles/2/GWI1008%2000.doc).
Why are behavioural interventions even on the agenda for a disease described by Professor Nancy Klimas
from Miami at the MRC/Action for ME Workshop in November 2006 as having an increase in class II
antigens HLA DR4, DR5, DQ3 and an immune response that has persistently shifted to the Th2 system so
the Th1 system does not function properly? (HLA antigens are responsible for the immune system being
activated to detect and eradicate foreign bodies; Th2 cytokines activate B‐cells, which in turn results in the
production of auto‐antibodies which can trigger autoimmune disease, as well as multiple allergic /
hypersensitivity reactions).
Put another way, how can behavioural interventions such as re‐educating the mind to believe that ME/CFS
does not exist as an organic disorder possibly be effective in restoring the immune system dysregulation
(including the chronic immune activation) that is characteristically seen in ME/CFS? Such mind‐changing
“interventions” are not the same as providing support and help in managing a life‐shattering disease.
Self‐proclaimed “experts” in disorders in which they are not medically qualified cannot always be relied
upon and such experts need to be rigorously questioned as to the source of their “evidence”, as was made
clear on 15 th July 2005 by the Chairman of the General Medical Council (GMC) Panel, Mary Clark‐Glass,
who was excoriating about one self‐proclaimed expert (Professor Sir Roy Meadow):
“Your misguided belief in the truth of your arguments maintained throughout the period in question and indeed
throughout this inquiry is both disturbing and serious. You should not have strayed into areas that were not within
your remit of expertise” (http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/Another_Meadow.htm ).
Straying into areas that are not within their area of expertise is widely believed to have become the hall‐
mark of Wessely School psychiatrists (for example, ME/CFS; fibromyalgia; irritable bowel syndrome;
interstitial cystitis; Gulf War Syndrome; multiple chemical sensitivity; repetitive strain injury).
Attention has been drawn in Sections 1 and 2 above to the involvement of psychiatrists in the totalitarian
regime in Nazi Germany in which the individual was subjugated to the over‐arching “needs” of the State
and in which the ethos and ethics of medicine were manipulated to achieve that goal.
It was not, of course, only the Nazi regime which distorted the care of the sick and vulnerable: as Robertson
and Walter point out: “medical ethics, and in particular, psychiatry, has lost sight of the Hippocratic tradition, a
process arguably brought about by the invasion of third‐party payers as part of the doctor‐patient
relationship…Historical aspects of psychiatric ethics have been well‐documented….including the abuses of psychiatry
in the Nazi era, the Soviet era (and) modern‐day China…Radden holds that the special virtues required of the
psychiatrist are compassion, humility, fidelity, trustworthyness, respect for confidentiality, veracity,