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

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anxiety and guilt of people with serious conditions by suggesting that they are causing their own illnesses, when all
along they are suffering from insufficiently understood but real diseases.
“The personal adviser will have a worrying degree of power over the lives of people who are by definition vulnerable.
GPs will no longer be looked to for independent, expert assessments.
“Sadly, serious disease and disability cannot be glossed out of existence by platitudes like ‘work is the best therapy’.
“People will not find comfort in the Government’s refusal to acknowledge the medical reality of their conditions, or
their own huge efforts to cope with these.
“In effect, though claiming to address the future, the DWP is turning the clock back to a time before
National Insurance, when the cost of sickness was borne by the individual and the family. The cost to
those people and their families will be incalculable”.
Professor Ravetz followed up her 2006 document with an article in The New Statesman published on 1 st
May 2008 entitled “Is Labour abolishing illness?” (http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/05/work‐
benefit‐claimants‐reform):
“We are told that we are footing an outrageously escalating bill for 2.4 million people, a million of whom shouldn’t be
on the benefit at all. The true picture is somewhat different. The unreported version is that only 1.4 million of the 2.4
million actually receive any payment (and) the audited estimate of fraud is under 1 per cent – the lowest of any part of
the social security system.
“A main selling point of the reform was the great savings it would bring. Delivery is being farmed out to private
agencies paid by results – which means, of course, the setting of targets. The next few years will be a bad time to
succumb to a serious disease, particularly a neurological one that does not have obvious outward symptoms.
“People must be healthier, which proves that huge numbers are exploiting a slack and obsolete system. Who is to
blame? It can only be the self‐indulgent, who fancy themselves sicker than they really are, and complacent GPs who let
them think they are too ill to work.
“The Government’s declared mission is …to overturn a culture based on the ‘medical model’ of illness.
“Doctors –‐ so often the refuge of desperate people trying to find out what is wrong with them – should as far as
possible be excluded from the process.
“Deliberate rejection of the ‘medical model’ deprives us of all we might have learned (from the wealth of data available)
of the impact of illness on our society.
“I have scratched my head long and hard over this reform…because so much of its theory and rhetoric contradicts my
own experience of chronically and seriously ill family members…and years of involvement in action groups for chronic
fatigue conditions. All this has impressed me with the courage of many who live with horrible complaints, the sheer
hard work involved in their day‐to‐day coping, their relentless search for any amelioration, let alone cure.
“I have witnessed, too, and at close quarters, the hurt and stress of living difficult lives in a perpetual culture of
disbelief and threat, where some of the most valiant are blamed for their conditions and conflated with the alleged ‘can’t
work, won’t work’ unemployed.
“For the message of the reform that comes across is that a person is valued only as a productive
unit….those too ill to work are outside society, and money spent on them is wasted. Sickness, disablement
and inability to work have no place in a modern society – they can’t and shouldn’t be afforded”.