Countrygirl
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Know thy enemy?
The following article is an old one, but it was written by Yvette Copper, Labour leadership candidate, who claims she had ME and recovered. While it is always good news to hear that someone recovered from this miserable illness, if that is what she had and not the more common version of post viral syndrome, she is spreading false and very unhelpful impressions of the disease. Certainly her quote that Dr Weir claimed that about 90% of patients recovered was publicly corrected by him. I have the impression that she has little knowledge or understanding of how very severe the illness is for high percentage of people and such misinformation , especially from a person in her influential position, is potentially deeply damaging to the patient community.
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/tired-of-all-this-miserable-me-stuff-1355561.html
The following article is an old one, but it was written by Yvette Copper, Labour leadership candidate, who claims she had ME and recovered. While it is always good news to hear that someone recovered from this miserable illness, if that is what she had and not the more common version of post viral syndrome, she is spreading false and very unhelpful impressions of the disease. Certainly her quote that Dr Weir claimed that about 90% of patients recovered was publicly corrected by him. I have the impression that she has little knowledge or understanding of how very severe the illness is for high percentage of people and such misinformation , especially from a person in her influential position, is potentially deeply damaging to the patient community.
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/tired-of-all-this-miserable-me-stuff-1355561.html
Aaargh. Not another moaning article about ME. The Royal College of Physicians, Psychiatrists and General Practitioners produced a report this week about chronic fatigue syndrome (unhelpfully called ME or yuppie flu) showing that 1-2.5 per cent of the population are affected by it. And, as always, a report on chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) acts as cue for another round of depressing arguments in the papers and on TV.
If it isn't some cynic sneering at "yuppie" malingerers, it's the dismal story of a sufferer condemned to year after dreary year of inactivity. But don't worry. I promise the next 1,000 words will be a drone-free zone.
Desperate to leave all the limpness, and the fuzzy-headedness far behind and get on with our lives we never mention CFS again. After all, people will think we are bonkers, unstable, susceptible to relapse - or just deeply boring. The result is that the cynics and the chronics hog the airways.
So it's time to correct the balance. I was sent to see a specialist in chronic fatigue syndrome, Dr William Weir, a consultant physician at the Royal Free and Coppett's Wood Hospital in north London. According to Dr Weir, 80-90 per cent of people who get chronic fatigue syndrome recover within two years. Even those who remain ill for a long time still have a chance of making a full recovery. As Dr Weir points out, "I've seen people who've recovered after 10, 15 or even in one case 17 years."
Faced with a sceptical public, and a media caricature of the illness as yuppie 'flu, the reaction from ME support groups is perhaps understandable. To convince us the illness is real and awful they provide us with gloomy case studies of people confined to their houses for years. Dealing predominantly with those who have not recovered, they tell us the prognosis for CFS is terrible. And they bemoan the lack of sympathy they receive from the medical profession and the outside world.
Unfortunately such gloom-mongering is counter-productive. A potentially sympathetic audience is turned off by the portrayal of CFS sufferers as victims. What starts as pity for their terrible plight turns quickly to contempt and boredom.
More important, sufferers are made to feel even worse by the overwhelming impression that they have no hope of recovering. The most dispiriting thing I did when I first fell ill was open a self-help book on ME. Within three pages, I was convinced my illness would last forever. Luckily, I had doctors and family who treated CFS as an ordinary, if unpleasant, illness, from which I would naturally recover