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Coyne: Patients writing about their health condition, abused by a peer reviewer, silenced by BMJ

Wolfiness

Activity Level 0
Messages
482
Location
UK
If it is Wessely, and I agree some of it sounds like him/ aka "the divine right of kings", what do you make of the statement " may God forgive me for my part in destroying the lives of some of these vulnerable patients."?

He says
We never took a social history and never carried out a mental state examination ... The patients would then be told that they had a condition called myalgic encephalomyelitis and would be sent home to rest with the prognosis that they would not improve but that there may be a cure in the future with advances in neurovirology.

So he thinks his sin was in diagnosing people with a neurological disease instead of a psychosocial disorder, prior to his Wesselian anagnorisis.

I would like to study the prevalence of huge amounts of screaming irony in systems that perpetuate human rights abuses. They seem to coincide a lot.
 
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Jonathan Edwards

"Gibberish"
Messages
5,256
@Jonathan Edwards @Chrisb

If it is Wessely, and I agree some of it sounds like him/ aka "the divine right of kings", what do you make of the statement " may God forgive me for my part in destroying the lives of some of these vulnerable patients."?

It sounds from evidence from others that it is not Wessely, but as someone says, there are many Wessely mouthpieces out there. Having said that, Wessely himself has made 'mea culpa' comments on occasions, indicating that he realises that he has fallen short in his handling of CFS/ME. But the comment in the review does seem a bit extreme.
 

jimells

Senior Member
Messages
2,009
Location
northern Maine
If it has been clear from the beginning that CFS was designed as a heterogenous diagnosis, what reason could there be for believing that all with the diagnosis would respond similarly to any given treatment?

It is clear that CFS was designed from the beginning to be a "non-diagnosis", that is, the intent was to bury the illness and the millions of patients who might try to claim expensive benefits. Here it is in their own words, on official NIH letterhead, to boot:

CDC AND NIH Officials Discussed "Desirable Outcome" of Seeing A Distinct Illness "Evaporate”.

"I predict that fatigue itself will remain the subject of considerable interest but the notion of a discrete form of fatiguing illness will evaporate. We would, then, be left with Chronic Fatigue that can be distinguished as Idiopathic or Secondary to an identifiable medical or psychiatric disorder.

I consider this a desirable outcome."

This is the real scandal behind the policy of non-research and patient abuse. I fail to understand while this document gets so little attention. Critics will say, "But this happened such a long time ago." I say, there are present-day members of this forum who were ill in 1994, and are still suffering the effects of the label "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome".