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

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they so desperately need and deserve and which is afforded to patients with other serious illnesses as a
matter of course.
Carried out by the Wessely School themselves, the MRC PACE Trial, however, is likely to ensure that ‐‐
suicide apart ‐‐ sufferers of ME/CFS will be offered only inappropriate and potentially harmful
psychotherapy and so will have no option but to continue unsupported to endure their ruined lives.
Neither the UK Government nor the medical / permanent health insurance industry is likely to care.
However, to quote US ME/CFS sufferer and advocate John Herd:
“With the advent of the Whittemore‐Peterson Institute’s XMRV research we may be entering a new and more relevant
era of research for our illness. So will it put the medical fantasies about the illness to rest? What of the likes of Simon
Wessely and Michael Sharpe who have both created and perpetuated those fantasies under the guise of supposed
science? For decades the psychiatric profession has been increasingly trying to elevate itself by portraying
psychiatry as pure science. What happens now that Simon Wessely’s and Michael Sharpe’s theories about
ME/CFS are being scientifically proven to be nothing more than tainted data conducted and created to
support preconceived flawed theories? What does the psychiatric research sector do now that it is becoming evident
that two of their own have corrupted ‘the science’ so profoundly? Do the psychiatric sector, academic medical sector
and government health sector distance themselves from such corruptions of science? That is usually what happens
when an investigator is shown to have been generating corrupted data. Or will (they) rally around to protect their own,
making the whole matter more scientifically reprehensible? As we enter this new era of ME/CFS research it is not
enough to let the gradual process of science illuminate the contradictory nature of Simon Wessely’s and
Michael Sharpe’s decades‐long campaigns. We advocates must bring the contradictions to the doorsteps of
psychiatric research, academic medical, government health and media sectors. If we do so effectively, we
can open the doors to more needed research in the days and months ahead” (Co‐Cure ACT, MED, NOT,
RES: Will dominoes fall? 26 th October 2009).
This will be difficult: eighteen years after the 1992 CIBA Symposium on CFS, members of the Wessely axis
are still promoting their agenda identified in the secret MRC document referred to above.
For example, in a 2008 paper comparing “chronic fatigue” in Brazil and Britain, Cho and Wessely et al could
not have been more explicit: “British patients were more likely to be a member of a self‐help group and to have had
sick leave / sickness benefit because of CFS, variables claimed to predict poor outcome…The greater public and
medical sanctioning of CFS/ME and the more favourable economic climate in the UK may lead to greater
access to sick leave / benefits for patients with chronic fatigue….There is also evidence of an association
between the so‐called ‘secondary gain’ and health outcomes….Therefore, the higher availability of sick
leave / sickness benefit because of CFS in the UK may both contribute to and reflect the greater
‘legitimisation’ of chronic fatigue as a medical disorder” (Physical or psychological? A comparative study
of causal attribution for chronic fatigue in Brazilian and British primary care patients. Acta Psychiatr Scand
2008:1‐8).
Reid noted how the article reflected the MRC‐funded PACE Trial of CBT and GET as set out in the Trial
Protocol that was published in BMC Neurology (2007:7:6): “Predictors of outcome: Predictors of a negative
response to treatment found in previous studies include…membership of a self‐help group, being in receipt of a
disability pension, focusing on physical symptoms and pervasive inactivity” (3,18,19)
(http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/Wessely‐axis.htm ).
There is no mention in that paper of on‐going viral infection but, perhaps expediently, in a paper that came
out about the same time as the XMRV news broke, Wessely quietly inserts his own new model that allows
for infection as a perpetuating factor, so the Wessely School goal‐posts may be subtly shifting: “…a model of
the aetiology of CFS can be constructed from a combination of pre‐morbid risk, followed by an acute event leading to
fatigue, and then a pattern of behavioural and biological responses contributing to a prolonged severe fatigue syndrome.