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

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• Disability insurance policy requirements increasingly imply the requirement for a claimant to
participate in a “physical rehabilitation” regime for the duration of a claim, and that disability
benefits may be terminated if a claimant refuses to take part in such (Wessely School)
“rehabilitation” regimes.
The UK Departments of State and the frequently‐changing Ministers of those Departments seem to remain
either unknowing, unperturbed or uncaring, so people with ME/CFS continue to be targeted and they
remain victims of the State which continues to follow UNUMProvident’s policies in respect of ME/CFS.
For more information about UNUMProvident’s involvement in the UK health service and the PACE Trial,
see Appendix III.
The refusal of the Wessely School to heed the biomedical science is causing increasing concern.
Last yearʹs winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Professor Luc Montagnier of France, who was one of the
discoverers of the HIV (AIDS) virus, says of ME/CFS: ʺScientists have already uncovered a lot about ME,
but this information does not reach professional healthcare personnel, and the disease is still not taken
seriously. It is about time this changes” (ESME [European Society for ME] Press Release for conference in
Stavanger, Norway, on 13 th June 2009: Experts launch Think Tank for Mystery Disease).
That concern also pervades the UK. On 5 th June 2009, commenting on a letter published in the UK Bristol
Evening Post about ME/CFS, Hilary Patten wrote:
“ME has been classified as a neurological illness by the WHO since 1969, and the UK Government have stated that
they accept it is a physical illness. Despite this, all research and treatment funding has been given to the psychiatric
profession who insist, against all medical evidence, that it is an ‘aberrant illness belief’. Sufferers are mixed up in CFS
clinics with patients who have a number of different fatigue‐causing illnesses, including mental disorders, and given
totally inappropriate psychological treatments that have been found by all patients groups to actually make them worse.
This is a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on biomedical research. There have been a
number of deaths from ME in which pathogens have been found in the heart, central nervous system, gut and muscles
at autopsy. Recent research has found a previously undiscovered prion in these profoundly affected patients. Until the
UK psychiatric profession release their stranglehold on this physical illness there will never be effective treatment for
ME in the UK. ME sufferers desperately need a diagnostic test to be developed. This needs funding to be redirected
away from the endless and useless psychiatric research and put into biomedical research”.
Ms Pattern kept up the public pressure: referring to reports that Conservative Member of the European
Parliament Daniel Hannan made in America about the shortcoming of the British NHS (the world’s third
largest employer after Indian rail and the Chinese army), where Mr Hannan said he “wouldn’t wish it on
anybody”, particularly its queuing, rationing and bureaucracy, on 16 th August 2009 she wrote to The Times:
“The quarter of a million sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in this country, who can access no effective NHS
treatment for their physical illness, might agree with Mr Hannan in that they would not wish their NHS ‘care’ on
anybody. Instead of receiving biomedical treatment, ME sufferers are mixed up with sufferers of other fatigue‐causing
conditions. All UK taxpayers’ research and treatment millions have gone to the psychiatric profession that insist,
against all scientific evidence, that it is an ‘abnormal illness belief’. The parliamentary Gibson report recommended
that these psychiatrists be investigated for a possible conflict of interest in also working for large insurance companies.
This has never been done. Is healthcare here also, in President Obama’s words,’working better for the insurance
companies’ than for ME sufferers?”. The answer is an unequivocal “yes”.
The presentation by Catriona Courtier at the Royal Society of Medicine meeting in the “Medicine and me”
series on 11 th July 2009 emphasised the scandalous situation faced by ME/CFS patients in the UK: