My response to the medically unexplained nonsense from Professor Moss Morris

  Dear Professor Moss Morris,

  as a doctor who has been bedridden for more than a decade with ME/CFS, the result of a major Relapse caused by harmful graded exercise therapy, which breaches the do No Harm principle of the GMC, I'm always amazed that doctors and other medical professionals in this day and age of the computer, where you can read up on all the evidence sitting behind your computer using PubMed, totally ignore all the evidence that what they say is wrong. On the other hand I shouldn't be so surprised as in the first part of your post you write that you are from Kings College and that's where the top dog of Pinocchio psychiatry resides who has been deliberately ignoring clinical evidence for decades that what he says is wrong, to the detriment of people with severely disabling neuro immune diseases.

  In Good Medical Practice, duties of a doctor, the GMC makes it's perfectly perfectly clear that not keeping up to date with the current evidence is unacceptable, unfortunately that is what you and the Pinocchio Psychiatrists are doing when you ignore all the evidence that ME/CFS is a debilitating physical disease and call it a medically unexplained disease instead.

  What is medically unexplained is that people like yourself totally ignore evidence. Or as Dr Shepherd, the honorary medical adviser of the ME Association recently wrote: "Failure to keep up with the research on ME/CFS is 'inexcusable'" http://www.meassociation.org.uk/2015/06/failure-to-keep-up-with-the-research-on-mecfs-is-inexcusable-our-letter-to-the-times-8-june-2015/

  As professor Hooper wrote a few years ago when does ignoring evidence become serious professional misconduct ? It's clear that the Pinocchio Psychiatrists have crossed that line a long time ago. Please do keep in mind that evidence that something is psychosomatic or all in the mind, because that's basically what you say when you call a disease medically unexplained, does not exist.

  Or to use the words of exercise physiologist professor Keller: "Given what we have learned in the past eight years about this illness, it is intellectually embarrassing to suggest that ME is a psychological illness."

  A Danish study showed a few days ago that the quality of life for people with this disease is the worst when compared with 20 other diseases, including a number of cancers, chronic renal failure, ischaemic heart disease etc. This also makes it perfectly clear that the current "treatments", ie CBT and GET, are at best totally useless.

  It would be "nice" if you change your post in line with all the current evidence that ME/CFS is a debilitating physical disease, and not a psychological or psychiatric disease, as the prestigious American Institute the IOM recently concluded after an extensive review of the literature.

  Instead of ridiculing and belittling us with psychosomatic nonsense it's more than time that we get proper treatment so we get our health and independence back, can come off benefits and go back to work.

  For your information Prof Mella, a Norwegian oncologist and his team recently published their latest study which not only suggests that ME/CFS is an autoimmune disease but also shows that two thirds of responders to the cancer drug Rituximab, are still in remission at the 36-month follow-up.

  So not medically unexplained but a debilitating neuro immune disease. More than time that you and Kings College get up to date with the current evidence instead of ignoring it, which is inexcusable, breaches the GMC guidance and constitutes Bad Medical Practice.

  Kind regards,

  Dr Maik Speedy

 

  #     Exercise physiologist Prof Keller: "Given what we have learned in the past eight years about this illness, it is intellectually embarrassing to suggest that ME is a psychological illness."

  #     Professor Hooper: When does ignoring evidence by doctors become serious professional misconduct ?

  #     Prof Edward Shorter and the psychic epidemic of ignoring clinical evidence

  #     Evidence that a disease is psychosomatic doesn't exist

  #     Massachusetts Medical Society's NEJM Journal Watch: "There is still no cure, or even any reliably effective treatment, for CFS"

  #     Editorial in Jacobs Journal of Physiotherapy and Exercise: it is essential to protect ME patients against harm by exercise regimes

  #     Rituximab maintenance infusions leads to prolonged disease remission in ME/CFS

  #     Immunological Similarities between Cancer and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

  #     Danish study finds patients with MEcfs have the lowest health-related quality of life of 21 conditions looked at which means / confirms that CBT and GET are at best totally useless