Severe censoring used by The Times on ME Association's Chairman Neil Riley's letter in response to Rod Liddle’s column about ME

by Tony Britton:

Neil Riley has asked me to flag up his original letter to ‘The Times”, when he responded to the lurid column by Rod Liddle. As you can see it was very heavily edited before publication – the heart and guts were torn out!


Sir,

Rod Liddle’s column about ME was factually inaccurate and needlessly provoking.

A look at The ME Association website would have told him that the term ME has not replaced CFS. It is the other way round. The medical profession has redefined ME as CFS so as to include both physical and psychological presentations.

Contrary to Rod’s assertion, The MEA agrees with the World Health Organisation and the Department of Health that Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a neurological condition.

His statement that The MEA website, http://www.meassociation.org, contains ‘foaming paranoia’ and that we believe Professor Simon Wessely is part of a conspiracy with the whole psychiatric profession, gives a misleading impression about The ME Association.

We make no judgments on personalities or their theories. Instead through the website we provide a rich source of factual information about M.E. However, there is on the site the opportunity for the public to comment on current news about M.E. Regrettably, as Rod will know, discussion pages on the internet attract a few who post uninformed rants.

The ME Association deplores the actions of that handful of activists who threaten those who disagree with their views. Our members are, however, rightly frustrated by the award of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to psychiatric research whilst there has been no support for bio-medical studies.

Recently, after great pressure from this charity, members of parliament, and other ME organisations, the Medical Research Council finally agreed a list of biomedical research priorities with ring-fenced funding for this purpose. We welcome this move and will be co-funding at least one such application.

As someone who has lived with M.E. for the last 25 years since catching a severe viral infection, I can assure Rod that this is a real, physical illness. Talk to the loved ones of those who have it, talk to their partners, their children.. Come and talk to me. We can tell you how the active, fun loving person they knew, suddenly became a physically exhausted and brain-fogged stranger.

Yours sincerely,

Neil Riley Chairman of The ME Association.
Unit 7, Apollo Office Court, Gawcott.Buckingham. MK184DF

See also: Exchange on Twitter between Mrs Simon Wessely and the Health Editor of the Times which shows that the old boy network of ignoring clinical evidence is more important than the lives of thousands of severely disabled people
See also: More psycho crap from the Times, this time from David Aaronovitch who can't be bothered to read the biomedical evidence that ME is a severely disabling infectious, neurological disease
See also: More psychiatric masturbation in The Times See also: CFS Patients Try to Help Researchers Despite The Fact that Researchers try To Kill Them with CBT and GET