http://www.nature.com/news/john-maddox-prize-1.11750
Two strong-minded individuals are the first winners of an award for standing up for science. [...] The British psychiatrist Simon Wessely and the Chinese science writer Shi-min Fang are the two inaugural winners of the John Maddox Prize. [...] John was distinguished for his championing of robust science. The prize rewards individuals who have promoted sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, with an emphasis on those who have faced difficulty or opposition in doing so.
Err, the cognitive behavioural model of CFS with CBT/GET, is not exactly a great example of "sound science" (in fact it is at serious risk of collapsing as a primary model), so the award must be more due to the alleged harassment. It is no surprise that Wessely has faced "difficulty or opposition" in promoting his opinions and studies on CFS. It strikes me as odd that out of all the candidates, a mediocre researcher in the backwaters of medical science is getting such an award,
especially if he supposedly retired from CFS 10 years ago due to harassment ie cowering away from the very field he is supposedly bravely sticking up for. And we all know how Wessely views cowardice in the military!
Sponsored by Nature and the Kohn Foundation, and stimulated and organized by the UK-based charity Sense About Science, the prize commemorates a former Editor of Nature, John Maddox.
I am sure you all would be shocked, *SHOCKED*, to discover that Wessely is on the "Sense About Science" advisory board (
http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/advisory-council.html).
He and his colleagues demonstrated substantial overlap in symptoms between chronic fatigue syndrome and clinical depression. He carried out a massive and ambitious study to test the link between common viral infections and later fatigue, and found that there is no simple causal association. He subsequently developed a treatment approach using cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques, which in many cases brought about substantial improvement and in some was life transforming. This treatment was tested in large clinical trials and can now be found in the guidelines of the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
High praise for mediocre and controversial research. Reminds me of how the Science Media Centre praised the PACE Trial as the "highest grade of clinical evidence", despite being a non-blinded trial without placebo control and purposely dropping an important objective outcome while relying almost entirely on self-reporting.
“All along the way,” says the individual who nominated him for the prize, “Wessely has had to suffer continued abuse and obstruction from a powerful minority of people who, under the guise of self-help organizations, have sought to promote an extreme and narrow version of the disorder. This version repudiates any psychological or psychiatric element to the extent that psychiatry is viewed as a contemptible discipline, which, by association, denigrates psychiatric patient.
Powerful advocates? LOL. Starting to sound like a conspiracy theory to me. CFS and ME advocates have to be one of the most *powerless* groups of people in modern society. Their efforts have fallen on deaf ears and/or frequently ridiculed. Everything gets conveniently labelled as "militancy" if it disagrees with the party line.
Wessely's pet view that CFS is a psycho>somatic functional disorder primarily perpetuated by mental factors, is arguably also "an extreme and narrow version of the disorder". And regarding psychiatry as a "contemptible discipline", anyone care to estimate the suffering and body count of psychiatry throughout its history? Comparatively, it appears that the darkest chapter in ME and CFS advocacy is an online cyber scuffle over XMRV, while the body count of the entire history of ME and CFS advocacy is a big fat 0.
Hostile letters, e-mails and even death threats have been directed at Professor Wessely over two decades. Mischievous complaints have been made against him and his clinical team, and bogus questions raised in the Houses of Parliament. He has suffered a vigorous Internet assault and coordinated attempts have been made to turn him into a hate figure. [...] Wessely is the first to acknowledge that others working in this field have received similar or even worse abuse. Nevertheless, the prize recognizes the very public stand that Wessely has taken over these issues.
Such abuse is terrible and unacceptable, if it is occurring. The problem is however, the evidence for such seems to be lacking. Every time it is raised, we are just supposed to take their word for it, even though AFAIK no evidence has ever been presented and no one has ever been arrested and convicted of a crime in related to the alleged harassment. Furthermore, these claims are always presented in a way which smears all critics as dangerous criminals: [only radical extremists criticize Wessely's EBM approach]. It is the latter which I find particularly irritating and slanderous, the blanket dismissal of all criticism, under the guise of promoting science and defending against ideological extremism.
He has been compared to Josef Mengele — particularly hurtful since Simon is the son of holocaust survivors. Simon has, perhaps naively, tried to deal with most of these by seeking dialogue and trying to educate and reassure, rather than by responding in kind.
He continually smears his critics in articles and has recently compared his critics to violent extremists who threaten and kill when insulted. That is "responding in kind". Anyone who has been threatened, or had family threatened or killed, by violent extremists, could take offense too.