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

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The same day, the following comments appeared on an ME internet group: “There is some parallel with the
treatment of ME patients in the UK: (1) ME patients are given a psychiatric label. (2) As a result, they are
regarded as irrational and their opinions are not taken seriously. (3) Effectively they are silenced, since no‐
one will afford them credibility. Not their GPs, not their MPs, not their employers, and sometimes not
their friends. (4) By silencing patients, their opposition is neutered, and psychiatric dominance in ME
continues unchallenged. (5) Liaison psychiatrists exult in their success, and bank their loot from the MRC
and DWP” (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LocalME/).
As Greg Crowhurst, husband of an extremely severely affected ME sufferer, noted in his paper “Be a trouble
maker”: “ ‘You can’t go after a health care system (that is) under the control of the insurance companies
and pharmaceutical corporations. That system is immune’ warns Noam Chomsky in his latest book
(Interventions; Hamish Hamilton, 2007), yet a radical corporate‐led health care system is exactly what New
Labour are bringing about in the UK, shadily and with little public consultation. Large companies are being
invited to tender for the commissioning function of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). Private companies will
then have control over which treatments patients receive and who receives them. Clinical decision‐making
will increasingly come under the control of commercial managers and shareholders. That great bane of ME
sufferers’ lives, the medical insurance industry – which since the mid 1980s has lobbied hard with great
success to have ME reclassified as a psychiatric behavioural disturbance, in order to avoid massive pay
outs – makes no secret of its intention to take over the UK health market. In 2001, UnumProvident launched
New Beginnings, a public‐private partnership which has been hugely influential in shaping policy,
especially in relation to the DWP’s Pathways to Work programme. Illness, according to (Unum’s) distorted
logic, is a dysfunction of the person; the problem of illness is located in the individual’s beliefs and
behaviour. New Labour’s Welfare Reform Act was passed in May 2007. ‘Pathways to Work’, based on Unum’s
behaviourist logic, is to be rolled out across the country by 2008. GPs and Primary Care staff will be offered rewards
for getting people back to work. All of this is taking place against a wider picture of social control and state
repression: as ‘the new rulers of the world’ (Pilger 2003), the corporations, aided and abetted by media and
government, take over and implement health and social policies consistent with their own strategic and
economic interests (Noam Chomsky, Failed States, Penguin 2003). These topics however ‘scarcely enter into public
discussion and the basic facts are little known’. What can be done? It means a day‐to‐day dedication to the task. It
means incredible courage and determination and above all a complete refusal to compromise on the truth that ME is a
physical disease” (Co‐Cure ACT, 14 th August 2007).
For more information, see “Corporate Collusion?” by Hooper, Marshall and Williams
(http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/Corporate_Collusion_2.htm ).
Interviewed on BBC Radio Ulster on 3 rd May 2006, Jonathan Kerr, Senior Lecturer in Inflammation,
Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Hon. Consultant in Microbiology, St George’s University
of London, discussed his work on abnormal gene expression in ME/CFS and went on record stating:
“(ME)CFS is complex and it does involve many different systems…many of these patients are severely
affected, so severely that they are bed bound and housebound for the duration of the illness, which may be
lifelong…those that are not bed bound or housebound will have severe limitations in their professional
capacity, their personal lives, their social life. So it is a very severe illness”.
The Medical Research Council’s PACE Trial Principal Investigators, however, think that ME/CFS is an
aberrant illness belief and that the behavioural modification strategies used in the PACE Trial are
curative.
Patients with ME/CFS and their families are in despair, because no‐one in authority in the UK seems to be
listening: as Mike O’Brien MP, Minister of State for Health, made plain at the APPGME meeting on 2 nd
December 2009, Ministers can no longer tell agencies of State what to do. This apparently means that, no
matter what conclusions are arrived at or what recommendations are made or what evidence is put before a
Minister, the Minister concerned can deny having any power to implement change. The Minister himself is
reported to have said that he could not require the MRC to undertake research in any specific field, nor