Hip
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According to Byron Hyde, funding stopped in about 1970 after the McEvedy and Beard paper which claimed ME was mass hysteria. Wessely was late to this bandwagon, but has been busy ever since he started, despite primises he no longer does CFS research.
Yeah, you are right, Wessely and Co got onto the bandwagon a bit later in the 1980s.
Though in fact the mass hysteria view of ME/CFS given by McEvedy and Beard in 1970 was already refuted before the 70s were out. Wikipedia says:
So since the McEvedy and Beard mass hysteria view of ME/CFS was refuted by the end of the 1970s, it is not clear how the erroneous psychiatric view of ME/CFS continued to be promulgated.Epidemic cases of benign myalgic encephalomyelitis were called mass hysteria by psychiatrists McEvedy and Beard in 1970, provoking criticism in letters to the editor of the British Medical Journal by attending physicians, researchers, and nurses who fell ill.The psychiatrists were faulted for not investigating the patients they described, and their conclusions have been refuted. In 1978 a symposium held at the Royal Society of Medicine concluded that epidemic myalgic encephalomyelitis was a distinct disease entity.
In an article in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, Malcolm Hooper argued myalgic encephalomyelitis should be used in place of CFS, and that research in the UK has been hijacked by a "lobby of psychologists and psychiatrists" holding significant power within the medical fraternity, with a resultant "gross abuse/neglect of patients."
No doubt the nefarious activities of the disability insurance industry played a major role in continuing to promote the psychiatric view of ME/CFS in the next decade.
The 1980s saw the creation of the label "chronic fatigue syndrome" by the CDC — a label which defined ME/CFS as psychiatric, rather than the extant neurological definition of myalgic encephalomyelitis — and the 1980s saw the rise of the Wessely School pseudoscience, which cast the ME/CFS disease as a psychological condition, specifically, casting ME/CFS as a disease whose symptoms were caused by the fact that you held the belief in your mind that you were ill.
All this continued to distract the medical community away from researching the enteroviral etiology that was known already back in the 1950s.
Arguably, had it not been for the distracting pseudoscience promulgated by the psychiatrists, the pursuit of the enteroviral etiology of ME/CFS would have been far more advanced by now. These meddling psychiatrists have wasted decades on fruitless psychological research, and usurped much of the research funding from what was known, even as far back as the 1950s, to be viral disease precipitated by enteroviruses (coxsackievirus and echovirus).
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