Disgraceful Psychiatrists

this excellent letter, or an edited version of it, was published in yesterday's Daily Mail:

"Is M.E. a genuine illness? poll in "British experts say ME virus is a myth", Daily Mail, 6 January 2010 #5

As an M.E. sufferer of over three years, I wish to protest most strongly at your promotion of a poll questioning the legitimacy of my illness (Is M.E. real?).

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/polls/poll.html

M.E. has been listed as a neurological disease by the World Health Organisation since 1969 and, as my diagnosis came from my GP, one would assume she knew what she was talking about and would not diagnose anybody with something that did not exist.

A year ago I lost my disability benefits solely because of the bias and misinformation held as `truths' by some doctors who work for the DWP - this was despite having physical tests results showing massive cell damage going on inside my body and providing irrefutable evidence of the physiological nature of my disease which is responsible for the overwhelming pain and fatigue from which I suffer.

An entire industry has been built up on the basis of denying the reality of M.E. as a disease, all based around vested interests of the insurance industry and certain psychologists who are in the pay of that industry and the DWP.

The recent discovery of the retrovirus XMRV in the blood of sufferers is about to bring their house of cards toppling down, hence their hastily bodged pseudo-replication of the WPI (Whittemore Peterson Institue) study which discovered the link with XMRV.

I think you will find the study put forth by the Behavioural unit of King's has not replicated the stringent protocols of the WPI's study, and therefore any conclusions forthcoming from their `research' are absolutely worthless, being totally incomparable to the original findings of the WPI.

That they were rushed through, and rushed to publish, is evidence of the panic taking hold amongst those who have built lucrative careers out of condemning extremely sick people as `malingerers' and the unworthy sick; the end of this disgraceful situation is nigh. No longer will the government be able to justify spending a big fat zero on biomedical research into my illness, leaving it to charities and individuals like myself to fund research into finding a cure.

UK psychologists can paddle as fast as they may, they cannot resist the turning tide of science, which will sweep them and their invalid ideas out into the sea of the outdated and unempirical. Don't give these ideas any credence with your ill-conceived poll.

Yours sincerely
Jenny Wilson
Swansea"