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

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Speakers included Professor Mansel Aylward CB, MD, FRCP and Aylward’s successor at the DWP, Chief
Medical Advisor Dr Bill Gunnyeon.
It must be remembered that Mansel Aylward is a member of the MRC PACE Trial Steering Committee.
Appendix III shows how the way may have been paved for the MRC PACE Trial and how it seems to be a
vehicle for the implementation of UNUMProvident’s policies.
The quotations in Appendix III illustrate just how impregnable is the meticulously constructed bastion
of the biopsychosocial model of illness that seems to reduce organic disease to the category of myth by
manipulating the concept of medical care to nothing more than corporate profit and wealth‐earning
potential for the benefit of commercial bodies and the State.
Backed by UNUMProvident and the Woodstock Group that, like the PACE Trial, was sponsored by the
Department for Work and Pensions (where, it will be recalled, Peter White is the lead advisor on
“CFS/ME”), it can hardly be denied that the Wessely School’s efforts to eradicate ME and to re‐categorise
CFS as a mental disorder have been successful within the UK and far beyond.
Despite the then‐Health Minister, Lord Warner, having confirmed in writing on 11 th February 2004 that the
Department of Health accepts that the correct classification for ME/CFS is WHO ICD‐10 G93.3 (ie.
neurological), in practical matters his letter seems inconsequential, because the “independent” agencies of
State (the NHS, NHS Plus, the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD), the DoH, the DWP, NICE and
the MRC) all regard and treat CFS/ME as a functional somatic (behavioural) syndrome, and CFS/ME
remains on the NHS mental health minimum dataset, to which all NHS personnel must adhere.
In 2007 the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination produced a further updated systemic review of the
treatment and management of adults and children with CFS/ME (CRD Report 35; University of York, July
2007) which asserted that there was: “evidence supporting the effectiveness of CBT and GET in reducing symptoms
and improving physical functioning”. That systemic review was supportive of the broad criteria for
“CFS/ME”: “The criteria inclusion for both the outcomes and interventions were broad, which was
appropriate and allowed for a more comprehensive over‐view of the available evidence”, with the CRD’s
own comment: “This was a well‐conducted and clearly reported review…conclusions are likely to be
reliable”.
Sadly, the conclusions are not likely to be reliable, because the patients studied in the review trials were
not tightly defined, so could have included anyone who felt a bit tired.
Clearly ME/CFS sufferers seem to be battling not only a devastating disease and their ruined lives, but
also a powerful and very extensive body of vested interests which works tirelessly to ensure that no‐one
will challenge the currently popular psychiatric paradigm (ie. that “CFS/ME” is a behavioural disorder).
That psychiatric paradigm, however, is believed by many to be wrong‐headed; they believe it is
unethical to “manage” patients with ME/CFS in the UK by means of ineffective and potentially harmful,
non‐evidence‐based “rehabilitation” therapies that have apparently been discarded by mainstream
international medicine and to offer nothing else, thereby abandoning large numbers of extremely sick
people. The plight of people with ME/CFS in the UK is a travesty.
What is so appalling is that in 21 st century Britain, people suffering from a devastating organic disease
have evidence to show that they are denigrated, derided, mocked, bullied, harassed, coerced, threatened,
deceived, overtly and covertly videoed, abused, subjected to injustice, denied their human rights, and
effectively abandoned by the State to the extent that no appropriate investigations that might confirm
their disease are permitted, all with the approval of the UK Government but at the apparent behest of a
mammoth insurance industry whose objective is to maximise their profits.