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

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Commenting on an article in The Economist, on 10 th January 2010, physician Dr M White wrote:
“I have spent more than 20 years treating these sick people and I can tell you that they are indeed terribly sick. My
sickest people are the ones with CFIDS/ME, not the ones with HIV or even cancer. I have treated everyone from young
children to other doctors, lawyers, and even psychiatrists ‐ and all make the same statements, all have tests and even
brain SPECTS that come back so similar that I am astounded. So, as a doctor treating these terribly ill people I
have not given Simon Wessely and his followers any attention. IF any of these people were to actually see
and treat the sick, they too would know that this is physical and not an emotional disease where one
cannot cope. My patients are a hardy bunch and I am rather impressed with their abilities to withstand the punches
that life, society and the medical community lobs at them time and again. I must say that I donʹt believe I could
withstand all that my sick people put up with. Do continue to cover this terrible disease but do so in a manner of
respect….You might also use solid data to make your case ‐ God knows that there are reams of data out there and easily
obtainable (and validated by numerous researchers and labs”)
(http://www.economist.com/node/15211401/comments?page=1&sort=asc).
Over 80 people took part in the 3‐year Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group on CFS/ME (1998‐2001);
details were available on 3,074 patients and the summarised results showed very clearly that the most
helpful strategies were pacing activity with rest (90%); the least effective strategy was CBT, which made no
difference for 55% and made things worse for 22%, and the most harmful strategy was GET, which made
things worse for 48%.
It was the Wessely School psychiatrists who, led by Professor Peter White, would not accept the organic
evidence and as a group walked out, refusing to sign or endorse the final report because they vehemently
disagreed with its conclusion ‐‐ they wanted the report to conclude that “CFS/ME” is a psychiatric disorder
and they objected to the report’s recommendation of pacing. Despite this, it is now the very same
psychiatrists who have been awarded unprecedented public funding to pursue their psychologically‐
focused research and who are calling the shots in the new Government‐funded Fatigue Service Centres.
It is time that these psychiatrists took notice and listened to what patients and medical scientists keep telling
them.
How can symptoms that clearly indicate significant pathology be so persistently dismissed and sufferers be
so denigrated, given the nature and severity of the problems presented? These include not only the watered‐
down subjective description of “fatigue”, but symptoms of organic pathology that ought to be unmissable
by any doctor.
It is, of course, the Wessely School’s view that the multiplicity of symptoms in ME/CFS confirms their belief
that it is a somatoform disorder, but if these psychiatrists do not acknowledge and identify such serious
symptoms as organic, they are not seeing patients with ME (so therefore should not describe their studies
and results as pertaining to those with ME).
It seems beyond dispute that it is psychiatric bias and vested commercial interests that drive current policies
about ME/CFS: as Hyde noted in 1992: “This failure to return to the literature haunts the very basis of their
definition” (The Clinical and Scientific Basis of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; The
Nightingale Research Foundation, 1992), a statement that is equally valid 18 years later, because it is the
continued failure to heed the literature that underpins the current unacceptable situation.
As there is an ever‐increasing body of evidence of an organic pathoaetiology, on what logical grounds do
these psychiatrists remain unconvinced that ME/CFS is an organic disease and insist that it is merely a
“mistaken illness belief”?
As Dr Jonathan Kerr from the UK noted: “One valuable approach that has not been widely adopted in the
management of (ME)CFS patients is to exhaustively investigate such patients in the hope of identifying