Living here in the US, I had been unaware of Peter Tatchell's work until now. He's not only an LGBT activist, but is best described as a human rights activist, (thanks Wikipedia). I think he's a great one to have on our side.
@richio76 might you know something about this? (Don't know where you are based or what field you practice in, sorry if I'm out of line tagging you into this one).
A psychiatrist, Dr. Fink, writing in the Journal of ECT (June 2014) had this to say of patient complaints;
“Complaints of persistent memory loss in otherwise well-functioning individuals after recovery from a psychiatric illness through ECT are best viewed as a conversion reaction or a somatoform disorder.”
Basically he says that ECT memory loss is somatoform because Wesseley said Aluminum poisoning symptoms in Camelford were all in the mind. Circular reasoning at it's best.
Fink is old enough to have used Insulin Coma on patients when it was still popular. Fatality rate 5%.
If you were working in a psychiatric institution back then you would definitely kill a lot of patients using pseudoscientific crap. Some people never learn it seems. Quacks, Fraudsters or worse.
But I wonder if the participants whose condition was made worse have any recourse?
Similarly, those who funded the project (ie mostly the taxpayers). Maybe one for the Taxpayers Alliance?
If the Taxpayers Alliance gave a shit about anyone apart from their wealthy donors perhaps. They'd use it as a reason to call for the abolition of the NHS.
I'm extra broke at the moment, and don't know if a documentary would be a priority for charity anyway, but I'd like to see a good documentary on changing attitudes to Tatchell.
That one's very similar to his first. Really good to have our concerns being promoted like this to those outside the ME/CFS world. I expect that the first one getting 150 retweets with @QMUL tagged in would not have encouraged them to appeal the tribunal judgement.
Some of those bad science people were an interesting education in how many 'skeptics' are really just looking for a form of authority to mindlessly trust. It's a bit worrying.
Some of those bad science people were an interesting education in how many 'skeptics' are really just looking for a form of authority to mindlessly trust. It's a bit worrying.