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

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The Judge said: “The ‘psychosocial approach’ describes the view that CFS/ME is a somatisation disorder, which needs
to be recognised and treated as such” (Introduction to Judgment, point 7). This is merely the Wessely School’s
belief: it is scientifically invalid.
The Judgment continued (Introduction, point 7): “In contrast, the ‘biomedical approach’ describes a view that
CFS/ME is an organic, neurological disease”. That ME/CFS is an organic disease is not a “point of view”, it is a
fact, and is substantiated by a wealth of scientific evidence, including the International Classification of
Diseases (ICD‐10).
Mr Justice Simon repeated the fundamental error of stating that there are two “views” and seems to have
drawn his conclusions and made his decisions based on the false premise that he was dealing with two
differing points of view, which is not the case, thereby casting doubt on the whole Judgment.
The Judgment, however, served to perpetuate the Wessely School myth that ME does not exist.
Myths in medicine are dangerous.
In his article “How myths are made” (The Guardian; Bad Science, 8 th August 2009), Dr Ben Goldacre shows
how easy it is for medical myths to be created: he explains how the rejection of best practice can cut to the
core of academia by distorting the facts: “to understand the full damage that these distorted reviews can do, we
need to understand a little about the structure of academic knowledge. In a formal academic paper, every claim is
referenced to another academic paper”, a practice that allows readers to “trace who references what, and how, to see
an entire belief system evolve from the original data”.
Goldacre tells how an arbitrary hypothesis came to be wrongly transformed into “medical fact” by the
frequent citation of just a few review papers, and how 95% of all citation paths flowed through just four
review papers by the same research group, which focused citations on the few papers that supported the
hypothesis.
Goldacre tells how Steven Greenberg from Harvard Medical School showed how these reviews “exerted
influence beyond their own individual readerships, and distorted the subsequent discourse” and how “through
incremental mis‐statement, in a chain of references, these papers came to be cited as if they proved the hypothesis as
fact, which they did not.
“This is the story of how myths and misapprehensions arise. Greenberg…found a web of systematic and
self‐reinforcing distortion, resulting in the creation of a myth, ultimately retarding our understanding of a
disease and so harming patients”.
Comment 20 of numerous comments about Goldacre’s article said: “One has to wonder whether these
people are consciously deceiving themselves or instead just have some peculiar mental block which
prevents them from seeing any fact which fails to confirm their prior assumptions. (There is a third
possibility that they are engaged in straightforward deceit)”
(http://www.badscience.net/2009/08/how‐myths‐are‐made/#more‐1309).
Many people – professionals and patients alike – wonder if this is precisely what has happened in
relation to the Wessely School’s studies on patients with “CFS/ME”.
From the wealth of data obtained under the FOIA it seems inevitable that the Wessely School’s myth that
ME does not exist will be cast in concrete by the results of the MRC PACE Trial.
Using their own brand of magical medicine, it seems that they will finally have succeeded in making the
disease ME disappear.