Virginia Gewin did no such thing as 'trying to find the truth'. She repeated defamatory and demonising trash about ME patients and should be ashamed of enabling such attacks on UK patients in print. Virginia appeared to be confused about who exactly are the victims of the rotten UK ME policy.
We are still awaiting an explanation from the UK MRC ME Collaborative (CMRC) for the outrageous and unsubstantiated statements by an Official of the UK Medical Research Council (Professor Stephen Holgate), which appeared in Virginia's article. There is no record of the events that Stephen Holgate describes in any CMRC public document.
PACE and FINE Trials are not just bad science. The 'therapies' of the PACE and FINE Trials, CBT and Graded Exercise have damaged a great many patients who were 'prescribed' those pseudo 'therapies' in the NHS, and on those actual Trials..
A great many patients have become far more sick than they were before doing CBT/GET. Other patients who refused to do GET (because they were too sick or knew from experience how damaging exercise is for them) have been hounded by their NHS doctors, labelled unco-operative and accused of not wanting to get better. Thats just the tip of the iceberg of sum total harm inflicted on ME patients .... who are now being perpetually demonised on top of the harm they have suffered. The patient-blaming rhetoric has to stop.
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I looked at this story & I saw a recycling of the 'death threats' meme, what looks like a twisted quote from someone who understands our fight and participates in it actively, and then knowing where it came from, and it all looks fishy.
@viggster is not necessarily sharing that reaction, and there are reasons for that. He has first-person knowledge of the situation that others besides
@medfeb and
@mfairma might lack. I'm not sure it's fair to expect
@viggster to hold views in line with everyone, or some. I get the sense he & I disagree on plenty of issues. But, like myself, and you, and even the must justifiably angry among us, he has a right to his own views. I wouldn't deny that to the people on the PACE team, either, though it looks like they may soon have to face professional consequences for those views.
There are people I won't cut any slack for, without naming names. I'm not the angriest member of this community, nor the most acquiescent; pretty unimportant in the scheme of things, too. I'm choosing to accept
@viggster's take on this, because he does have firsthand knowledge. Things are developing, and quickly. We're going to have to deal with not every article seeming or feeling fair (James Coyne warned us to expect 'setbacks' along the way on Twitter yesterday, so I've got my seat belt on), even if we perhaps thought we were moving quickly past that point given the events of the past 3 weeks especially.
I don't particularly like the article; I especially don't like the 'death threats' thing, or an omission here or there (esp. Lightning Process). Or the connection to the publisher. But, this person is a potential friend. We've made our concerns and opinions known. They're valid. I would hope they've been taken into consideration. I may well be alone in this, but I think that we're in a phase where reasoned dialogue with journalists is a wiser course, at least once we've already made our concerns known. You want to continue to lambast
@viggster? Fine, go ahead. I honestly don't see the point, but I wouldn't want to be scolding someone to keep quiet or anything. I just think it may be wise to think about swallowing temptation to reiterate points with people (like the reporter) who come to this with no familiarity as far as what's going on--or, more importantly, the decades of history, injustice, needless suffering.
I don't care if Isabel Hardman flounced off. Her pal Liddle isn't even worth discussing, or Pemberton, or Hanlon, or others we haven't heard from in awhile, like Michael Fitzpatrick, James Delingpole, or Theodore Dalrymple. All of whom have written disparaging things, although back in the past (and hopefully not in the future, although at this point every super-negative article is more a reflection on them than it is on us).
Neither do I want to condescend to
@viggster & try to infer that anybody in particular knows more about what's going on than anybody else. We'll all come to our understandings in due course. I had a problem with this article, still do. I may have overstepped in my analysis. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should still express more anger about it. In this case I think it's all been said, but, hey, whatever. Maybe I wouldn't say that if it didn't seem like we're currently the focus of something else that pops up pretty much almost every day in the mass media.
Remember 'Unity?' Eff that. I didn't trust the people who thought that was necessary, or even a good idea, still don't (with a couple of exceptions). That was never going to get us anywhere. I think the diversity of opinion is not only a good thing but a major key to why we're poised to make an impression on people, now that we have a couple of doors opened that never really have been before. So by all means, continue on--the anger IS justified, make no mistake about it. I just don't think there's something to the idea that, once having made a point, maybe we can move on to the next one.
