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

88
As noted above, Aylward was an invited speaker at the CCRNC conference on 23 rd April 2009 and his
presentation was especially disturbing. His 39 Power Point slides include the following extracts:
• “The Power of Belief….Differentiating: Health Illness, Sickness and Disease…Social and Cultural
Contexts…The Fatigue Syndromes” (slide 2)
• “The Psychosocial Dimension: How people think and feel about their health problems determine how they
deal with them….Extensive clinical evidence that beliefs aggravate and perpetuate illness and
disability…Beliefs influence perceptions and expectations; emotions and coping strategies;
motivation” (slide 5)
• “Illness, Sickness and Incapacity are primarily psychosocial rather than medical problems. More
and better healthcare is not the answer” (slide 6)
• “Strengths of the BPS model: Places health condition/disability in personal/social context” (slide
17)
• “A Way Forward: Management…must address barriers to recovery….False beliefs – pivotal
role…Social factors – pervasive” (slide 18)
• “Barriers to recovery and return to work are primarily personal, psychological and social rather
than health‐related ‘medical’ problems” (slide 29)
• “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Management: CBT and NICE Guidelines” (slide 35)
• “Promoting and Achieving Further Success: Believe that people can radically transform their
behaviours with the right kind of impetus…Embrace the integrated bio‐psycho‐social paradigm
shift” (slide 36)
In his slide 2, Aylward asserted: “beliefs aggravate and perpetuate illness and disability” but, as noted above,
Epstein is clear: “the notion that cognition rules behaviour has not been adequately proven by any test”.
Professor Aylward’s presentation, like his publications referred to above, is not in accordance with the
international biomedical evidence about ME/CFS and is a cause for serious concern.
Statements of Concern about CBT/GET provided for the High Court Judicial Review of February 2009
Over twenty renowned ME/CFS experts provided Statements in support of the Judicial Review of the NICE
Guideline on “CFS/ME” heard in February 2009 in the High Court in London. Although they were
specifically written in support of the challenge to the NICE Clinical Guideline on “CFS/ME”, they express
concern about the recommendation by NICE that the only management of ME/CFS should be CBT and GET,
ie. the subjects of the PACE Trial.
Extracts from those Statements for the High Court include the following:
• “In my view, the Guideline is biased and over rigid in its recommendations and will put a large number of
ME sufferers at risk of harm through its strong recommendations for the use of CBT and GET. CBT is based
on the idea that somatoform disorders are maintained by abnormal or unhelpful illness beliefs which lead to
abnormal or unhelpful behaviour. The first requirement for a somatoform diagnosis is that there be no
physical cause for the symptoms. This is not the case in ME/CFS” (Malcolm Hooper, Professor
Emeritus of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Sunderland, November 2007)