Curer makes a specific proposition:
“the psychiatric model of ME is directly responsible for both this abuse and neglect, and the refusal to fund adequate medical research for over a generation.” Which comprises a statement of cause and effect(s)
cause = psychiatric model,
effect = a) abuse and neglect and b) refusal to fund adequate medical research . It is irrelevant who comes forward with testimony of abuse and neglect, because of itself that testimony can not provide evidence of the causal relationship that Curer is claiming in the case of abuse and neglect, and has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the issue of research. Without evidence of causal linkage this is all so much story telling , so why should I or anyone else accept it at face value ?
Even if we accept each other’s personal stories at face value (which is fine in a discussion about how dreadful our lives are) how does that resolve the
causal fallacyproblem ? We are still left with argument of cause and effect that has no evidence of causal linkage. Anyone is entitled to believe in such a linkage, but propounding it as certain fact demands evidence.
Not all proposed cause and effect relationships require
evidence to justify reasonable belief in them. A reasonably obvious chain of
logical cause and effect can make such beliefs quite rational. I can quite reasonably propose that the belief of one racial group that another racial group is inherently inferior is a significant cause of racial oppression of that group. It's not a proposition that I feel I need to justify with evidence. If somebody doubts an obvious proposition like this, the onus is on
them to come up with evidence that it is not true. So, IVI: what evidence do
you have that this apparently obvious proposition - that a psychiatric model of ME/CFS inevitably leads to less belief in ME/CFS as a biomedical disease or illness, and thus to neglect, abuse, and underfunding of medical research - is false?
Roughly speaking, the psychiatric model of ME suggests/argues/postulates that the chronicity of ME/CFS is caused/perpetuated by 'faulty illness beliefs' on the part of the patient. The school that has pursued this line of inquiry for the last 25 years has unquestionably received the lion's share of state funding for ME/CFS research. Nuances aside (since weasel words, linguistic games, and the empty circular reasoning of the hypothesis itself make it virtually impossible to say anything about the 'psychiatric model' without it being disputed as an accurate description of the ever-changing presentation of the model), in essence the psychiatric model can fairly be characterised as focusing on the patient's own behaviour or beliefs as the most important factor in perpetuating the illness. Whatever the intended meaning of the psychiatric school's words, and whatever their interpretation of their own research, that research - the dominant model in the UK - quite plainly is widely interpreted and understood by many people as suggesting or confirming that ME is an illness that is 'all in the mind' or 'all in the behaviour' rather than a regular 'physical illness' or 'disease'. Quite obviously the dominance of a psychiatric model in research and treatment has this effect. And quite obviously, if this model is false, then it will cause neglect, abuse, and underfunding of appropriate research.
Evidence aside, and thinking about this simply from logic and from common sense, it beggars belief that an intelligent person can seriously question that the dominance of this model causes abuse, neglect, and failure to fund medical research.
It really should be quite obvious to anyone that the popularity of this 'faulty illness beliefs' model, this way of thinking about ME/CFS, increases abusive situations for patients, encourages neglect of patients' medical needs, and discourages fund-holders from recognising the need to pursue medical research. This would be the case even if the Wessely's followers did not explicity say - as they do - that patients should be encouraged to 'push through' and try to ignore their feelings of pain (abuse), that practitioners should be 'economical with the truth' when communicating their beliefs to patients (abuse), that patients should not be given further medical tests because that may reinforce their faulty beliefs that they are sick (neglect), and so on and on and on. It would also still be the case even if it were not the case - which it is - that the panels assessing research funding proposals have historically been dominated by psychiatrists who have voted down proposals for medical research (see evidence above, which is unfortunately somwhat circumstantial and incomplete simply because the actual evidence of research proposals and rejections is conveniently not available to the public).
What kind of evidence
could be sufficient to confirm Currer's cause and effect proposition? We have evidence of correlation - the dominance of the psychiatric view coinciding with a failure to fund medical research - but correlation doesn't prove causation. But then, what evidence
could prove this? A statistical historical analysis, looking at various countries, finding consistent correlations between the dominance of the view that ME/CFS is imaginary/psychiatric and low levels of funding for (bio)medical research? Would that prove the proposition? But then, when you think about it, the two things we're trying to correlate here are more or less the same thing. If the 'functional' hypothesis is dominant, the biomedical model is less so, necessarily.
Surely the reason why there's no such evidence is that nobody would waste their time trying to prove a very obvious correlation between a proponderance of heads and a paucity of tails? Most people would consider such propositions too obvious to require 'evidence', and I can't really see what there is to doubt about this particular cause-and-effect argument. Doubting and questioning things that seem simple common sense to most reasonable people can sometimes lead to great historical breakthroughs in understanding, but the great minds that achieve such breakthroughs have to put a convincing alternative explanation as well as merely doubting. In the absence of such a credible alternative hypothesis, scepticism of apparently obvious propositions tends to just look ridiculous.
