Journal of IiME Volume 5 Issue 1 (May 2011) The Media and ME continued the PACE Trial Investigators insist that they have been studying those with “CFS/ME”, which is how they refer to the neuroimmune disorder ME/CFS. The pressing question has to be how the Wessely School can be permitted to disregard the everincreasing biomedical evidence-base on ME/CFS and to refuse – on no evidence whatever -- to accept the WHO classification of ME/CFS as a neurological disorder. Some authors have attempted to dismiss this disease as hysterical, but the evidence now makes such a tenet unacceptable….The organic basis is clear What can be done to halt the Wessely School‟s anti-science activities and misinformation about ME/CFS which they propagate and disseminate with consummate skill? Since they will not budge from their beliefs, could they be right and the biomedical scientists be wrong? Not at all: the Wessely School is gravely mistaken about the nature of ME/CFS and about their ascription of its symptomatology to a somatoform disorder. In 1978 (33 years ago), the BMJ published a summary of the symposium on ME held that year at The Royal Society of Medicine: (BMJ 3rd June 1978) “there was clear agreement that myalgic encephalomyelitis is a distinct nosological entity. Other terms used to describe the disease were rejected as unsatisfactory for various reasons: the cardinal, clinical features show that the disorder is an encephalomyelitis….Some authors have attempted to dismiss this disease as hysterical, but the evidence now makes such a tenet unacceptable….The organic basis is clear – from the finding that the putative agent can Invest in ME (Charity Nr. 1114035) be transferred to monkeys, the detection of an increased urinary output of creatine, the persistent findings of abnormal lymphocytes in the peripheral blood of some patients, the presence of lymphocytes and increased protein concentration in the cerebrospinal fluid of occasional patients, and the neurological findings” Apart from their close involvement with the medical and permanent health insurance industry and the unpalatable fact that their professional lives may be shown to have been spent in a null field of research (i.e.. trying to prove that ME/CFS is an aberrant illness belief), it remains a mystery as to why, as bona fide mental health researchers, the Wessely School so persistently refuse to engage with the extensive biomedical evidence-base that exists on ME/CFS. As Dr David Bell said in his book “Faces of CFS – Case Histories of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” (Lyndonville, New York, 2000): “I have no problem with not understanding the exact mechanism of the symptoms of CFS…I do have a problem with the lack of respect given patients with poorly understood neurological disease”. Bell points out that the chest pains, racing pulse, shortness of breath, flushing, trembling, twitching, difficulty maintaining balance, headache, physiological exhaustion to the point of collapse, inability to walk, and pooling of blood on standing experienced by ME/CFS patients all result, not from what Wessely School psychiatrists deem to be deconditioning or “hypervigilance to normal bodily sensations”, but from the dysautonomia that is so prevalent in ME/CFS (in an effort to supply blood to the brain, the patient‟s blood pressure sky-rockets almost to levels that could cause a stroke but then dives, www.investinme.org Continued page 15 Page 14/58
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