PACE Trial findings are preposterous

Derek Peters, Northern Ireland Campaign for ME/CFS, Published on Tue Mar 01 2011:

WE as an ME patients organisation must protest at the waste of public money by a group of psychologists and psychiatrists who have spent £5million and six years finding that increasing exercise is good for sick and exhausted ME patients and that they can be talked out of being seriously ill by cognitive behaviour therapy.

For what is recognised as a neurological disorder by the World Health Organisation, this illness leaves 25 per cent of sufferers bedbound for life, and this survey is a preposterous and expensive insult. Using an outdated criteria for this unscientific research, we see that the patient cohort contained many patients who had not got ME at all; 47 per centhad psychiatric problems and 33 per cent were on antidepressants.

What is needed is a team of neurologists and virologists to pursue the groundbreaking findings of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute in the US which found ME patients to be carrying the retrovirus XMRV. The government banned ME victims from giving blood on the foot of this discovery, but has never given any funding to carrying forward this research or any other biomedical research, and it is a national scandal that patients have to fund research into their illness.

Derek Peters

Northern Ireland

Campaign for

ME/CFS

See also: PACE trial results are out: ME is caused by an oncogenic virus or Metabolic dysfunction causes Post-Exertional malaise in ME/CFS