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Research "clearly and consistently" shows that exposure to pesticides and other toxins caused GWI

justy

Donate Advocate Demonstrate
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5,524
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U.K
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160126130134.htm

Date:
January 26, 2016
Source:
Boston University Medical Center
Summary:
Twenty-five years after 700,000 U.S. troops fought and won the first Gulf War with remarkably low casualties, research "clearly and consistently" shows that exposure to pesticides and other toxins caused Gulf War Illness, a complex and debilitating disorder that affects as many as 250,000 of those deployed, according to a new report.
 

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
Wessely tried to cover this up with his psychobabble.

PS: he claimed that fear of chemical exposure created symptoms of chemical exposure through a psychosomatic mechanism. It's funny how a supposed mental health expert writes batshit crazy things.
 
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John Mac

Senior Member
Messages
321
Location
Liverpool UK
Wessely tried to cover this up with his psychobabble.

Exactly
Which is why it's nice to read in the report:

"The report makes clear that psychiatric problems "have been ruled out" as a cause of Gulf War Illness, noting that Gulf War veterans have lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychiatric disorders than their counterparts who served in other wars."
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-a...ing-borrowed-something-blue-the-true-story-of

Shellshock was finally seen to be a psychological condition, and so are many others. So is Gulf War illness then a psychological condition after all?
Let’s go back to our study and have a look. [Illustration on screen.] This is a standardised psychiatric interview. I won’t bore you with the details, but it is to find out are Gulf veterans and the control groups suffering from identifiable psychiatric disorders, and indeed some are. You can see, of our sick Gulf veterans, 24% overall, a quarter of them, have a recognised psychiatric disorder, which is twice the background rate of the controls, so doubling the rate. They are twice as likely to be suffering from psychiatric disorders – not, incidentally, post traumatic stress disorder, which, as you know, is the kind of quintessential psychiatric injury; they are much more likely to be suffering from mood disorders and depression. So there’s the doubling of rates, which is clearly very important, but that also means three-quarters of them are not suffering from diagnosable psychiatric disorders, so is this then a psychiatric condition? No, that is not sufficient to explain the ill health, but it certainly contributes in some, and that is of course extremely important. Now, that’s not say that covers the whole thing, because the problem with a diagnosis like post traumatic stress, is that it depends upon identifiable trauma, as had clearly happened to Arthur Hubbard. But for many Gulf veterans, the issues were not the kind of classic trauma beloved of Vietnam films; it was more a chronic sense of unease and fear - the fear over the six months before Desert Storm, as the Americans call it (and this is the American data now): the fear engendered by chemical weapons, which of course is a very scary business. So we must have a broader concept of the role of psychological injury than just pure PTSD.

So they were traumatized because they heard too much about dangerous chemicals.

We can be pretty confident then that, for the majority of Gulf veterans, damage to the peripheral nervous system is not likely to be a significant cause of what we have observed from their health.
We did, however, also look at the central nervous system - that’s the brain, basically. One way of doing that is through neuro-imaging, but we didn’t get the money to do that, so instead we have used sophisticated neuro-psychological testing, which has been largely normal in this group as well. [Illustration on screen.] All you need to see here – there are subjective complaints of difficulties in concentration, memory and so on, and these are complaints of problems with depression, and you can see there is a relationship between the two. So the more depressed people were, the more they complained of difficulties in thinking and cognition.

and have cognitive problems due to depression.

So clearly then, something is going wrong. [Illustration on screen.] Don’t worry about the figures here, but this is the measure we have of physical functioning. Despite the fact that I have just cycled to Paris, I score about there. So again, this shows you the importance of comparing like with like. Actually Gulf veterans are, in their physical health, doing a little bit better than normal population controls, because they come from a military background. They are still doing less well than Bosnia, but that’s not actually quite as important as the second finding.
Now here, I feel pretty fit – I don’t feel fit, that’s not true, but I feel that my health is pretty good, so I score about here. There is a big difference with the Gulf veterans: they feel that their health has been affected, they feel worse, they feel sicker, their perception of their health has been dramatically changed

they feel sick but objective testing does not show anything wrong = another way of saying all in the mind.

It’s not revealing any secrets to say that in recent years we have become more and more concerned about the effects of our environment. [Illustration on screen.] We have lots and lots of articles like this warning us of the dangers that lurk in our environment, such as toxicity, that are not necessarily related to the Gulf conflict at all. It’s very hard to open theDaily Mail without finding some other hazard to our life. These concerns are all around us, not just in the military. If we look at a headline like this – Gulf War Hero’s Radiation Sickness: Scandalous Secret of Desert Fever – this is reflecting back on the very first slide I showed you, the risk from depleted uranium. The problem is depleted uranium is indeed a toxic agent, but it isn’t actually radiation; its toxicity comes from its properties as a heavy metal. It could be that part of the fear here comes from that word “radiation”, which of course links to our fears of Chernobyl and so on, which is the highest thing that we are most anxious about in society. That may be why depleted uranium, for example, is such an emotive issue, when its real hazards, as I say, are those of heavy metal poisoning.

the media is making us anxious.

So where are we then? Gulf War illness. On the one hand, we’ve suggested that it is triggered by the particular vaccine policy that the UK armed forces used in good faith in 1991. That is the first story. The second story is that we’ve had them before. We have had vaccinations and the particular hazards of the Gulf, and that’s also true. The third story is that we are also dealing with complicated social issues. I’ve not gone through this, but there’s the influence of culture, the influence of the fact that many Gulf veterans when they came back from the Gulf were promptly sacked, under Options for Change. Indeed, if you remember, and I told you about the particular epidemiology of the Gulf, that if you have to think about something that affects lots of people, in all three armed forces, irrespective of the role they had in theatre, what could do that? Number one, most people were exposed to the medical counter-measures; number two, most people were exposed to the general hazards of war; and number three, most people were also exposed to the particular cultural and social controversy around Gulf War Syndrome, and it is from those three that we must find our answers.

People lost their job and began to somatize. The bio-psycho-social model is important.

Number one, most people were exposed to the medical counter-measures;

That is the BIO.

number two, most people were exposed to the general hazards of war

PSYCHO

and number three, most people were also exposed to the particular cultural and social controversy around Gulf War Syndrome, and it is from those three that we must find our answers.

SOCIAL

Summary of his cryptic speech:

GWS is a bio-psycho-social illness. Not a real illness.

Soldiers got anthrax vaccines. That was the bio. Then they had psychological trauma from hearing too much about biological weapons. That is the psycho. Then they lost their job and status and the sick role enabled them to have a new role in society. That is the social.
 
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Cheshire

Senior Member
Messages
1,129
Well, in the Camelford poisoning case, Wessely didn't deny that there had been an exposure. But he said the symtoms weren't caused by the chemicals, but by the fear of having symptoms because of the polution.

In this talk, he uses the same sick argument about exposure to chemicals during Gulf War.

As he doesn't deny the implication of a virus in the onset of MECFS, but the perpetuation of the illness is only due to faulse illness beliefs.

I hope it will all end up with excuses like in the case of the Camelford poisoning, but white whasher Wessely will always find a way out.
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
All proof that Wessely is either:
~demented, in which case he should accept he is unfit to practice medicine and stand down, or be struck off by the GMC.
~grotesquely egomaniacal and refusing to accept scientific fact, and thus criminally irresponsible towards *hundreds of thousands if not millions of patients* (250,000 ME patients in U.K. plus many other similar health problems, and his influence affects lot of the English speaking world)
~or a mouthpiece for political/corporate masters wanting problems "covered up", in which case he is *evil* (hey, have a look at who gets "honours" in the UK) .


over all the CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY to prevent acceptance, research and treatment of these illness is *GENOCIDE*
and should be dealt with as such, by seizure and arrest of all those involved and their data and riches bought at the cost of vast human suffering and death.
And put a death warrant on any of the scum who escape to non-extradition countries
hey if we drop drone missiles on terrorist vermin (and lots of innocent folk!), these "denial" bastards, be they crooked researchers or their political/corporate/banking masters who really fuel the whole thing, should be hunted down like the monsters they are. Terrorists are penny ante small timers compared to these bastards!
 
Messages
5,238
Location
Sofa, UK
Well, in the Camelford poisoning case, Wessely didn't deny that there had been an exposure. But he said the symtoms weren't caused by the chemicals, but by the fear of having symptoms because of the polution.
More accurately, he said that it would be impossible to demonstrate scientifically that the symptoms were caused by the chemicals, because somebody (him, or one of his followers) would be able to argue that any harmful consequences could have been caused by the knowledge that they'd been polluted and the stress that caused them, rather than the exposure itself. Sick, and dumb, but he and others continue to get away with it...
 

Cheshire

Senior Member
Messages
1,129
More accurately, he said that it would be impossible to demonstrate scientifically that the symptoms were caused by the chemicals, because somebody (him, or one of his followers) would be able to argue that any harmful consequences could have been caused by the knowledge that they'd been polluted and the stress that caused them, rather than the exposure itself. Sick, and dumb, but he and others continue to get away with it...
Even more twisted, he strongly implies something, without openly dismissing another option so as to have an open door in a corner of the room.
He can't lose, we can hardly win.
 

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
Even more twisted, he strongly implies something, without openly dismissing another option so as to have an open door in a corner of the room.
He can't lose, we can hardly win.

yeah he ALWAYS does that!
always put's a "fudge" in so he has a "get out of jail free" card

"I'm just a physician who means the best for patients! I am sorry that I was wrong but I sincerely believed my position, m'lord!"
he'd say at a criminal trial.
Slicker than Teflon snake shit and ten times as nasty!
 

Large Donner

Senior Member
Messages
866
More accurately, he said that it would be impossible to demonstrate scientifically that the symptoms were caused by the chemicals, because somebody (him, or one of his followers) would be able to argue that any harmful consequences could have been caused by the knowledge that they'd been polluted and the stress that caused them, rather than the exposure itself. Sick, and dumb, but he and others continue to get away with it...

I would love to see him use this argument on cigarette smoking. The man is just a complete moron, not even a bit of a moron, or halfway to being a moron - he is a fully qualified completed moron.
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
I would love to see him use this argument on cigarette smoking. The man is just a complete moron, not even a bit of a moron, or halfway to being a moron - he is a fully qualified completed moron.

i don't know if he is a moron. If you read carefully you can see that he knows very well what he is doing. I don't think that his double-speak is a coincidence.

People who fall for it might be morons or maybe just overly trusting or uninformed.

He reminds me more of a politician or defense lawyer than a researcher.
 

MeSci

ME/CFS since 1995; activity level 6?
Messages
8,231
Location
Cornwall, UK
Well, in the Camelford poisoning case, Wessely didn't deny that there had been an exposure. But he said the symtoms weren't caused by the chemicals, but by the fear of having symptoms because of the polution.

In this talk, he uses the same sick argument about exposure to chemicals during Gulf War.

As he doesn't deny the implication of a virus in the onset of MECFS, but the perpetuation of the illness is only due to faulse illness beliefs.

I hope it will all end up with excuses like in the case of the Camelford poisoning, but white whasher Wessely will always find a way out.
Here is his take on the Camelford poisoning.
 
Messages
5,238
Location
Sofa, UK
every time I go to the science daily website it slows my (admittedly antiquated) system down to non-responsiveness.
Have you tried using an Adblocker (e.g. as plugin to Firefox), disabling Flash and (if necessary) Javascript for that site? Likely that would fix that problem, and should also be a solution for any other sites where you have the same problem.
 

Snowdrop

Rebel without a biscuit
Messages
2,933
@Mark
Thanks for the suggestions. I really would like to be able to access the site. I have almost a religious devotion to adblocking etc but I'm unsure as to Javascript and flash part. Will have a look.
 

GreyOwl

Dx: strong belief system, avoidance, hypervigilant
Messages
266
This is personal for me.

(I believe) GWI provides a pharmacological model of ME/CFS, so SW's puppeteers will give anything for him to (continue to) discredit it. Unfortunately, a pharmacological model will show the BPS model of many "MU" diseases as the BS it is.

Edit: Unfortunately for SW, not us.