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ALL Countries Please sign the MEA's new petition to NICE:do not classify ME as 'functional'

Messages
26
Location
Gloucestershire
I wrote to a neurologist in the 90s (whose name annoyingly I cant remember as so long ago) as think he had an advice leaflet, and he sent me a copy saying that there was nothing physically wrong and patients needed to accept that a biomedical cure would never be found!
I replied I was astonished that a scientist could say such a thing as absence of proof is not proof of absence.
 

Daisymay

Senior Member
Messages
754
I have just had an interesting conversation with my wife.

I was under the impression that Andrew Dillon was a doctor. That meant that if he was going to be resistant to seeing the PWME side of things there might be pretty little chance of changing his mind. Doctors are like that.
It is shocking how so many doctors don't change their minds, how rigid they are in their thinking. They like to think of themselves as scientists but so many of them don't think like scientists. It seems as if a large proportion of doctors function like establishment parrots maintaining the status quo, irrespective of the scientific evidence.
 

charles shepherd

Senior Member
Messages
2,239
*Dr Phil Hammond has tweeted his approval...He is a colleague of Esther Crawley at the Bath paediatric ME/CFS centre

*Previously he has written about the PACE trial in his Private Eye column



Dr Phil Hammond CV:

http://www.drphilhammond.com/blog/

>>

My NHS work is as part of a specialist NHS team in Bath, treating young people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME, based at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath. Details of the service we offer are here Good advice on accessing specialist CFS/ME services and treatments available can be found via the AyME website (for people up the age of 25) and the Action for ME website (for those over 25)

I might go and see him when he comes to the Sub Rooms in Stroud next week!

CS
 

slysaint

Senior Member
Messages
2,125
"Dr Phil Hammond @drphilhammond
But all our patients with CFS/ME have post exertional malaise"

So what exactly is their definition?

The MEGA team have yet to come up with a description.

The NHS say:
"The main symptom of CFS/ME is feeling extremely tired and generally unwell......
Exercising usually makes the symptoms of CFS/ME worse. Sometimes the effect is delayed and you'll feel very tired a few hours after you've exercised, or even the next day."

NICE just says:"characterised by post-exertional malaise and/or fatigue (typically delayed, for example by at least 24 hours, with slow recovery over several days) "

?
 

Demepivo

Dolores Abernathy
Messages
411
Dr Phil Hammond CV:

http://www.drphilhammond.com/blog/

>>

My NHS work is as part of a specialist NHS team in Bath, treating young people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME, based at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath. Details of the service we offer are here Good advice on accessing specialist CFS/ME services and treatments available can be found via the AyME website (for people up the age of 25) and the Action for ME website (for those over 25)

I might go and see him when he comes to the Sub Rooms in Stroud next week!

CS

After you've introduced himself, bonded as medical professionals and given a decent a suitable non pushy interval you might suggest he updates his website :p

The tweets maybe aren't maybe entirely to our taste but at least he engages with patients and does not accuse them of harassment for asking legitimate questions.
 

Large Donner

Senior Member
Messages
866
He needs to be tweeted over the PACE trial protocols etc and respond to why Crawleys thinks 30-40% of people recovered from it - they didn't!!

I'm also sick of hearing how "exercise" can help people. Why cant they understand the difference between exercise and managing exertion including activities of daily living. I'm so sick of hearing it called exercise, its not. Exercise is what I would be doing in my spare time by going to the gym for an hour or swimming for an hour or walking for an hour or hiking or riding a bike on top of living a normal life with normal amounts of exertion if I was not ill.

Also he doesn't seem to be saying anything about the severe group of ME in his response about "a cluster of illnesses" and how doing LP on tired teenagers cannot be extrapolated to a neuro immune disease.

Exercise is a powerful intervention. Get the dose right, it can help some people. Get it wrong, it can cause harm. Which is why it is graded

That's called pacing. It's definitely not GET as prescribed by the BPS crowd and its not why its called graded. Graded exercise therapy is from the false notion that gradually increasing exercise in an "exercise phobic" person RECOVERS people from ME.

If he is claiming to practice it differently in his clinic he should be calling it pacing. On top of that he has also admitted in that tweet that GET can harm people.

This is just another slight of hand by calling pacing GET whilst still claiming pacing failed in the PACE trial.
 
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Invisible Woman

Senior Member
Messages
1,267
The game of semantics again:

GET as they deliver it shows no evidence of harm in one text. When by definition GET will hurt pwME who suffer post exertion malaise.

So perhaps he could define what he means by the following terms:
1 GET
2 Harm
3 PEM
4 the criteria he uses to diagnose ME

Then he says that he call it's graded because if you get the "dose" wrong it will cause harm. Is he then implying I tell one patient to do this much and another to do something else? The word graded meaning different levels for different people. Cause I've never seen it used like that before.

So:
5 define graded