CORPORATE COLLUSION

CORPORATE COLLUSION?


The UK Medical Research Council has a secret file on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) that contains records and correspondence since at least 1988; the file is held in the UK Government Archive at Kew and cannot be opened until 2023.

This present document is an overview of the misinformation and contradictions about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) that have pervaded some UK Departments of State and other agencies since 1988.

It also considers the involvement of certain UK psychiatrists who have proven vested interests in the propagation of this misinformation that is contrary to world-wide scientific evidence and that for two decades has resulted in the medical abuse of UK patients with ME/CFS.

Professor Malcolm Hooper Eileen Marshall Margaret Williams

Contact address: malcolm.hooper@virgin.net

SEPTEMBER 2007



Professor Anthony Pinching is currently AfME’s Principal Medical Adviser. He is lead adviser on “CFS/ME” to the Department of Health and was responsible for allocating the £8.5 million grant from Government for the new “CFS” Centres that deliver only psychotherapy. His views on “CFS/ME” were set out in his article in Prescribers’ Journal in 2000:40:2:99-106, published when he was Deputy Chair of the Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group on “CFS/ME” (“CFS is not related to on-going exertion”; “the Oxford criteria are too narrow for clinical use”; “over-investigation can [cause patients] to seek abnormal test results to validate their illness”; “complementary therapists sometimes introduce or reinforce unhelpful illness beliefs”; “the essence of treatment is activity management and graded rehabilitation”).

In March 2001 AfME produced an excellent report, Severely Neglected: M.E. in the UK. This report was the result of a membership survey of 2,338 respondents, making it the biggest survey ever done on ME in the UK.

Its confidential Preliminary Report of 28th February 2001 stated: “graded exercise was reported to be the treatment that had made most people worse” but in the published version, this was changed to reporting that graded exercise made 50% of respondents worse.

This makes it all the more surprising that AfME “is working closely with Wessely and his colleagues on research initiatives funded by the MRC and the NHS” when those “initiatives” are based on graded exercise.

AfME’s report found that 77% of respondents experienced severe pain because of ME; nearly two out of three had received no advice from their GP on managing the illness; 70% were either never able, or were sometimes too unwell to attend a doctor’s clinic; 80% of those who were bedridden by ME reported that a request for a home visit by a doctor had been refused, and that many people did not receive State benefits to which they were clearly entitled and desperately needed in order to survive.

By aligning itself with the Wessely School, who have a 20 year published track record of denigrating patients with ME, AfME has done patients with ME a massive disservice and may well have devalued the charity’s own important report.

Michael Sharpe has a similar published track record to that of Wessely: he asserts that in “CFS/ME”, personality factors have been shown to perpetuate disability; that no immunological, virological or nuclear imaging tests should be carried out on such patients; that “the label of CFS avoids the connotations of pseudo-diagnoses such as ME”; that “change in belief is an important factor in recovery”; that psychosocial factors are important in “CFS”; that his own view has long been “the issues around CFS/ME are the same as those surrounding (patients) who suffer conditions that are not dignified by the presence of what we call disease”.

Peter White, another key member of the Wessely School, misinforms medical students and clinicians about ME/CFS: together with Anthony Clare, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, Peter White contributed the section on Psychological Medicine in the medical textbook that is likely to be on the desk of every GP in the UK as it won the ‘Highly Commended’ British Medical Association Award (Clinical Medicine: Kumar and Clark, 2004, 5th edition: published by Saunders: ISBN 0 7020 25798). It is promoted as “one of the most highly respected textbooks of medicine in the world. It is used by medical students and practising doctors, as well as by many other health professionals. It has been translated into several languages”. One of the editors is Parveen Kumar, Professor of Clinical Medical Education at St Bartholomew’s and The London, Queen Mary School of Medicine (ie. the same institution as Peter White). The entry for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis directs the reader to the entry for CFS, which in turn directs the reader to Section 21 (Psychological Medicine) where CFS/ME is listed under Functional or Psychosomatic Disorders: Medically Unexplained Symptoms. White and Clare assert that the psychiatric classification of these disorders is “somatoform disorder”, which the authors state were previously known as “ ‘all in the mind’, imaginary and malingering”.

It is only when dealing with “CFS/ME” (and Gulf War Syndrome) that these psychiatrists are regarded by Government bodies and the medical insurance industry as “experts”.

These psychiatrists are on record as being actively involved in social engineering via the deliberate creation of “psychosocial” illness.

They believe that the biomedical approach to healthcare (ie. that ill-health and disability is directly caused by disease and its pathological processes) is (quote) “a blind alley” and that the correct approach is the psychosocial one, in which “aberrant” thoughts, feelings and behaviour can be “modified” by their own brand of cognitive behavioural therapy with graded exercise (CBT/GET), resulting in restoration of health and productivity.

Such a retrograde belief is fallacious, as the regime in question has been shown to be ineffective and even the proponents of the regime are themselves on record as acknowledging that (i) it is not remotely curative (ii) modest gains may be transient and even illusory (iii) these interventions are not the answer to “CFS/ME” (iv) patients have a tendency to relapse and (v) evidence from randomised trials is no guarantee of treatment success.

Tactics of denial used in relation to ME/CFS as a physical disorder

Revisionism and denial of established evidence in medicine is nowhere more apparent than in the case of ME/CFS, and the choice of Government medical advisers is a matter of great economic impact.

To policy makers and commissioning officers in a cash-strapped NHS, the advantages of denial must seem attractive. The last thing needed is a chronic disease which affects hundreds of thousands of people, so accepting advice which promotes the view that the condition in question is neither new nor particularly disabling (and that the disorder is largely self-perpetuated) makes instant economic sense, especially if the advice also recommends that granting state benefits to those affected would be not only inappropriate but counter-productive.

In ME/CFS, denial is directed at undermining the experience and expertise of doctors who hold different views from Wessely School psychiatrists.

In medicine, denial ought to be very rare due to the peer-review system but, as noted above, in the case of ME/CFS, many peer-reviewers and editors of journals appear to share the same views as the deniers, so that articles and research papers which show a lack of objectivity, which misrepresent the existing literature and which make unsubstantiated claims abound, with the consequence that readers are deliberately misled.

In the UK ME/CFS literature (mostly as a result of the assiduous activities of psychiatrists of the Wessely School), there is evidence of a systematic attempt to deny the severity of the symptoms, the role of external causes and the nature of the illness.

Such is the profusion of articles, reports and research papers produced by this group of psychiatrists that there is now a widespread belief that ME/CFS is not a disorder which requires money to be spent on specialist tests or on expensive virological, immunological, vascular or gene research, let alone on long-term sickness benefits.

It may be informative to compare the tactics of denial listed above as identified in the TV programme with a selection of methods and tactics used by those engaged in denial activity relating to ME/CFS:

• Deniers consistently ignore existing evidence which contradicts their own preferred theories: they disregard evidence, they misconstrue findings, they distort figures and they speculate

• Deniers apply a double standard to the evidence --- they support their own claims with a select choice of studies, with flawed research (ie. with research which has been shown to be flawed in the medical literature), and with a mass of generalisations, whilst insisting that the opposition provides irrefutable proof.

These authors down-play and attempt to overlook inconsistencies in their own research. (Indeed, on one spectacular occasion, when challenged, Simon Wessely actually blamed his peer-reviewers for allowing his own indisputable “mistake” to evade rectification)

• Deniers challenge the expertise of those with whom they disagree, implying that their own claims are based on balanced scientific scholarship whilst those of others are based only on myth

• Deniers portray sufferers as victimisers, claiming that it is patients who are guilty of targetting psychiatrists; who then portray themselves as the vulnerable and wronged group. There is reference to “vicious campaigns” organised by “pressure groups” and to unreasoned hostility on the part of the patients

• Deniers minimise or trivialise the distress and suffering of those with ME/CFS, alleging that patients exaggerate their symptoms and suffering

• Deniers promote the view that patients have only themselves to blame, and that the problem is therefore not external but internal

• Deniers often include a totally reasonable and uncontroversial supposition (for instance, that decisions must be based upon the best evidence), which gives the impression that their other arguments must be equally reasonable and valid

• Deniers often suggest or imply that patients are motivated by financial or secondary gain (even though there is not a shred of evidence to support such a claim), and that their claims for state benefits are unjustified

• Any negative characteristics of a minority of patients are typically generalised and ascribed to all ME/CFS patients, without any supportive evidence

• Deniers suggest or imply that patients have formidable powers, for instance that they are able to influence certain institutions; that they get the media on their side and even that they have managed to influence the World Health Organisation. It is also alleged that patients use such tactics to misrepresent the situation to lead others astray

• Deniers even re-write medical history and alter it so that it appears to support their own claims (this is certainly demonstrable in the psychiatric interpretation of the early ME literature)

• Deniers may attempt to rename or reclassify the condition (for example claiming it as a modern form of an old (psychiatric) illness)

• Deniers make inappropriate comparisons between syndromes, suggesting that they are all simply the same (psychiatric) syndrome, ignoring or downplaying any specific and / or unusual features which are present.


Illustrations of denial by the Wessely School:

In the case of ME/CFS, it seems apparent that the tactics of denial which were exposed in the Channel Four programme mentioned above are indeed being implemented by the psychiatrists of the Wessely School; out of the many available illustrations, just the following are provided: read the rest on Page 92, which you download here with the rest of this excellent document …………….

Great stuff Professor Hooper, Margaret Williams and Eileen Marshall, a much needed antidote against delusional psychiatrists and their vested interests, aka CBT-ism …………..