The Independent - Leading article: Friday, 9 October 2009
"The symptoms are disabling tiredness, irritable bowels, intense headaches, depression and cognitive dysfunction. Yet for years many doctors argued that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome didn't exist. They refused even to dignify it with the name previous sufferers preferred – Myalgic encephalomyelitis. ME, they said, was just "me" writ large and dismissed it as yuppy flu. In the event the flu has lasted longer than the yuppies did. Some four million people suffer from it in the United States alone.
Now two potential avenues for cures come along at once. Researchers in Utah claim to have discovered the gene involved. Another team in Nevada have found compelling evidence that a retrovirus, like HIV, might well be implicated.
Scientists could be on the brink of a breakthrough. We must hope that they are. That would – at least – go some way to compensating for the shameful manner in which sufferers were treated for so long by the medical profession."
Doctor Speedy and ME in search of medical honesty
Prof Simon Wessely's Wikipedia page now says this:
ReplyDelete"In relation to the XMRV virus found in two thirds of CFS patients, Wessely has pointed out that this research fails to model the role childhood abuse and illness behaviour plays in the disease"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wessely
(it also fails to model the role suppressed memories of alien abduction plays, is the man a total numpty?)
Wessely has pointed out that this research fails to model the role childhood abuse and illness behaviour plays in the disease"
ReplyDeleteDesperate clutching at straws while throwing the dummy out the pram, morelike. It's really wearying listening to that endless drivel. Enough already.
'illness behaviour'! - that's slander Professor Wessely. His 'research' fails to model the role physiological abnormalities, documented, explained and proven by science, play in the disease - with not an illness behaviour or childhood trauma in sight.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-public-spending-and-deficit-1801803.html
ReplyDeletetwo letters in Independent
weird because AfME have not,as far as I can tell,ever funded biomedical research