Journal of IiME Volume 9 Issue 1 May 2015 IiME CONFERENCES – 10 Years Professor Malcolm Hooper Professor Malcolm Hooper Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Medicine at Sunderland University. The 10th Annual IiME Conference is a remarkable achievement of the human spirit and deserves the strongest applause and recognition for 10 years of very hard work and the way in which the energy and commitment of the ME community has been harnessed in the interests of patents, carers, scientists and clinicians. Patients and carers have found reliable information about the illness and been given hope in their demanding and often ignored situations. A string of eminent and ground breaking international scientists and doctors have addressed the IiME Conferences and reported on their work and accepted the challenge of communicating it without dumbing it down. This has made the Conferences invaluable in disseminating reliable and up to date information that specialists as well as parents and careers have found encouraging and revitalising. All who attended gained much with some experts making a commitment to engage with the illness and face the challenge of ME, a serious, multi-system biomedical illness that can Malcolm Hooper, via his advocacy and championing of human rights for ME patients, was instrumental in the formation of UK charity Invest in ME not to be dismissed or superficially engaged with by the ideological stance of both Government, Insurance Agencies, DWP and NICE - an unholy alliance that is using the now utterly discredited PACE trial to support their stance. The recent draft P2P report has exposed the inadequacies of the somatoform / psychiatric / psychological approach that has sought to resist all the biomedical evidence presented at conference after conference. The P2P draft report states: 1. the Oxford Criteria (designed and used by psychiatrists) should be retired since they result in a confused and confusing mixture of patients from which only confused and confusing data can be measured which cannot be reliably analysed. Reliable and objective measurement is noticeable by its absence in many of these studies. 2. Any studies using the Oxford Criteria should not be used to direct treatment (CBT and GET). The vast number of papers produced by the Invest in ME (Charity Nr. 1114035) www.investinme.org Page 8 of 57
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