Leopardtail
Senior Member
- Messages
- 1,151
- Location
- England
Again @N.A.Wright you have ducked the issue. How it looks to Alex is how it looks to me here in the UK. Dr MyHill has not had a single complaint from a patient. The complaints all originated within the NHS and by Doctors whose primary training is those shoddy guidelines - the changes requested to her website were minimal and the judgements made by a panel of doctors with no expertise whatsoever in the field of ME - further that panel included a close associated of a complainant who should have recused himself.. The fact that you seem to agree with them does not change that fact.The current thread is about a specific NHS service, where, just maybe because of the current attention on that service there's a possibility of redirecting in a small way, how that service is delivered, to the benefit of ME/CFS patients. Shifting from a cure focus to a management focus with patients expressly leading the process, would be achieveable even under NICE. Railing against the iniquities of psychiatry and the power structures of the modern world isn't going to do a thing to help ME/CFS patients in Essex.
That may be what it looks like from the other side of the world, but that is a very poor representation. Implimentation of NICE guidelines is cost driven, it's the lowest common denominator in a health service that is being thrown headlong into a market model. One of the ironies about the Southend issue is that the problems there make it more likely the future contract for the service will go to a private concern where any change to the service will be impossible because of contractual penalties and patient participation in service delivery is not being written into the £15 billion worth of outsourcing that is happening in NHS England.
The reference to Myhill is simply wrong, for who as a GP in private practice (ie not an NHS contract), the NICE guidelines have only very limited relevance. The GMC does not operate surveillance but responds to complaints and as far as I can tell the issues Myhill faced were around complaints about information presented on her website, which she was subsequently required to change because some it didn't meet the professional standards demanded by the GMC. As a body the GMC isn't fit for purpse, not because it harrasses good doctors, but because it does not operate energetically enough for the interests of patients and does not penalise bad doctors sufficiently.
Seriously - Godwin's Law ! In a discussion about a local NHS ME/CFS service ? Lets hope none of Collings and Newton's colleagues have been drawn here by the controversy. Most NHS staff, even those critical of psychiatry would have sympathy for all the staff working in the Southend ME/CFS service, if they were to think the attitudes expressed in this thread are what the staff there have to to deal with on regular basis.
The type of article written by these two individuals even under the name 'rapid response' contributes to the ignorance and misinformation and their professional position added 'undue weight' to a personal opinion. While the BMJ/Lancet may be known to us as little better than the Sun, or daily Star newspapers (poor quality tabloids for those resident outside the UK), they remain a primary source of information for most GPs. This view regarding those publications is supported by a ruling against them from the press complaints commission vis-a-vis PACE. Anybody working in the field of ME has a special duty of care not to re-enforce negative stereotypes perpetrated against the people in their care. If a person treating black people described them as 'being ill due to laziness' we would call if 'discriminatory' and 'gross professional misconduct'. There is no reason why ME should be any different. In the case of ME forced activity, as usually praticed by the NHS is in fact negligent action.
You may find it 'boring' to keep hearing the same justifiable anger, we find continuous neglect a great deal more 'boring'. I four example had three underlying medical conditions that collectively formed my 'ME' - it took me less than 2 weeks with severe mental dysfunction to work out what tests were needed, and less than two months to establish the follow up tests. All of this with no medical training. It took me more time to get a doctor to do the tests than it did to work out what was wrong - I was proven correct by those tests.
The kind of nonsense we have been discussing here is why most GPs are so useless - it is they quality of information they are given.
Equally I agree with @heaps that failure to consider the symptoms is why we don't move forwards, but I found that my GP glossed over my symptoms because of the very attitude that this kind of 'article' or 'rapid response' promotes. Our GPs are actively encouraged to ignore our symptoms: this is a failure of diagnosis 101 and highly unprofessional at best, negligent at worst.
Last edited by a moderator: