Journal of IiME Volume 5 Issue 1 (May 2011) The Involvement of the PACE Trial Principal Investigators and the Director of the Clinical Trials Unit with the Department for Work and Pensions continued ME/CFS community in directing agencies of State such as the DWP, NICE, the MRC and the NHS away from the Wessely School‟s inflexible approach to a chronic, inflammatory neuroimmune disorder. For those involved at the highest level in directing the DWP‟s policy towards people with ME/CFS to have been the ones involved with the PACE Trial could be seen to indicate an unacceptable level of bias and commercial collusion against extremely sick and vulnerable people for whose disorder there exists an abundant biomedical evidence-base which continues to be systematically ignored by the PACE Trial Principal Investigators and those they advise. ME QUOTES “if you look at the activation markers, they are raised in both CFIDS and acute viral illness….Some individuals…will not be able to turn off that activated state. The agent remains as a constant thorn, forcing the immune system to be activated until the agent is eliminated. In these individuals, the immune system never returns to a normal resting state. So these people are in a state of chronic immune activation. What is the result of this chronic immune activation? If an activated white cell is doing its duty, it has to be producing a certain number of lymphokines or cytokines that are working to control the agent that is infecting the body. But these cytokines can have side effects….Cytokines affect the brain, the bowel, the muscle, the liver (which) one sees in CFIDS. So, increased cytokine activation can affect many different tissues in the body (and) can also cause reactivation of other viruses….This disorder could be controlled by eliminating the causative agent or quieting down the hyperimmune system….There is much clinical information showing that (CFIDS) has often led to other immune diseases….The sequelae…include autoimmune disease and, on some occasions, MS”. - Dr Jay Levy ME FACTS in patients with ME/CFS, CBT/GET has been shown to be counterproductive in many patients. Based on the evaluation of the Belgian Reference Centres, the Belgian Minister of Health officially declared that CBT/GET should not be regarded as a curative therapy for ME/CFS. This evaluation revealed that the exercise capacity/condition of the patients treated had not improved and that the occupational participation had even decreased after CBT/GET. Two large-scale patient surveys in the UK and Norway, and two smaller surveys in Scotland and The Netherlands indicate that CBT/GET aggravates the condition of many ME/CFS patients. - Chronic fatigue syndrome: Harvey and Wessely's (bio)psychosocial model versus a bio(psychosocial) model based on inflammatory and oxidative and nitrosative stress pathways by Michael Maes and Frank NM Twisk - http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/35 Invest in ME (Charity Nr. 1114035) www.investinme.org Page 41/58
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