Have you ever spoken with Simon Wessely? I'm no fan of the man, but having been around this illness for over 20 years, I have found that not everything that is written or said is fair.
Plus, there is another angle here - Wessely has stated that there are sick people misdiagnosed with "his version of ME" and they are really sick, but it is just not ME. Well, what is Wessely doing to correct that? If Professor Edwards sat down with him and discussed the above issue - that of sick patients - rather than the issue of what is or isn't ME, we might get somewhere.
What exactly have we got to lose? Edwards losing his temper and punching Wessley bonus!
I have corresponded with him by email and found him to be just as nutty as we already observed him to be. Fairness has nothing to do with Wessely and his false beliefs, IF he really believes what he says. He has said the ME researchers had rather go over Niagara Falls in a barrel than continue their research, and he has said he doesn't do ME/CFS research any more, but he keeps going back at his attempt to discredit not only patients but those researchers who are doing real science.
Prof. Edwards is under no obligation whatsoever to waste any of his time and/or energy talking with a quack like Wessely. IF Wessely only read the biomedical research and understood it, he would have, LONG AGO, come to the conclusion that ME/CFS is a biomedical illness. That the neurological aspects of it are due to brain and nervous system damage.
Way back in 1982 when I first got ME, there were already brain scans that showed punctate lesions resembling those in MS, AIDS and Alzheimers in the brains of those with ME/CFS. As a matter of fact, we are already "getting somewhere" in the biomedical research, despite those who would divert us from it by renewing stupid arguments like this one.