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

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body of evidence that these diseases are biomedical, there is still a school of thought that they are
psychosocial behavioural conditions and that they can be overcome with firm handling, a course of
cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercises. It is apparent that this view still prevails at the DWP.
This is so despite Ministers’ repeated assurances that they and the Department for Work and Pensions’
employees and agents fully agree with the Department of Health statement that they ‘accept the World
Health classification of CFS/ME as a neurological condition’….This Bill compounds the problems that have
emerged from last year’s welfare reforms. The language is harsh, the sanctions punitive and the rule inflexible.
It appears that decision‐makers will use subjective rather than objective measures as a basis for their plans…Past
experience has shown that, no matter what the claimant tells the decision‐maker or what his medical notes indicate, a
claimant with a fluctuating condition is likely to be ‘directed to undertake specific work‐related activity in certain
circumstances’. The Minister spoke about eliminating discrimination. To quote again from that report: ‘The fact that
people with ME cannot readily convey the reality of their illness experience on existing assessment forms or in early
assessment interviews shows that, from the first interaction, such illnesses are discriminated against’….I am worried
that there is no indication in the Bill of the level of training that will be required of the advisers and decision‐makers or,
if they are to be supplied by contract with the private sector, what practical and ethical checks will be made on their
decisions”.
This DWP control (where Professor Peter White is lead advisor on “CFS/ME”) seems to bear an alarming
similarity to the National Socialist influence that swept across the Continent of Europe during the early
20 th century.
In 2001, the American Journal of Bioethics published an article by Warren T Reich from Georgetown
University who reported on an inquiry into ideas that were used to justify the shift of medical ethos in
Germany prior to and during the Nazi era (AJOB 2001:1:1:64‐74). Reich, Professor Emeritus of Bioethics in
the Georgetown University School of Medicine, considers the evidence in relation to the current ethos of
care of the sick and the manipulation of that care:
“To develop an adequate ethic for the healthcare professions, we need to look more deeply into the sentiments and
commitments of healthcare professionals…If we pursue this, we encounter precisely the sort of ethic on which
much of Nazi medicine was radically built, namely, physicians’ attitudes and the state’s attitudes towards
care.
“Erwin Liek and Karl Kotschau were two enormously influential physician‐theorists who argued for the reorientation
of care (and who) were radically altering the major goals of medicine.
“By minimising and even belittling clinical care of the individual…their argument entailed the manipulation of the
very idea of care.
“Liek was a prolific and extremely popular writer who wielded enormous influence in the medical world of Germany
and many other countries.
“Major responsibility for medical care shifts to the state, while the rationale for receiving care depends more and more
on the individual’s contributions to the state.
“Following Liek’s death, (his disciple) Kotschau was still proclaiming –‘almost with ideological obstinacy’ – that
medicine and people generally should turn away from their primary interest in disease, its treatment and cure (care of
individual sick persons), and apply themselves to health, its promotion and preservation (ie. the needs of the entire
society)”.
Turning away from a primary interest in disease, its treatment and cure in favour of the commercial
interests of “society” seems to be exactly in what the PACE Trial Chief Investigator, Peter White, is
engaged, so it is worth reiterating his beliefs: “some people believe that medicine is currently travelling up a
‘blind alley’ (and) that this ‘blind alley’ is the biomedical approach to healthcare. The biomedical model assumes that