Bob
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Firestormm said:Theirs is not an approach that says 'psychosocial' factors are causing ME for example and neither is Wessely for what that's worth.
Firestormm, I don't understand how you have come to that conclusion. Because, that is exactly what Wessely believes. In his reply to Mar, he states that a patient's beliefs 'perpetuate' the illness (i.e. a patient's belief system perpetuates their 'disability'). What this means, in his model of illness, is that CFS/ME is firstly triggered by an event. (I think, in his model, the trigger event can be viral, but it can also be emotional or stress related etc.) Then he says, some people recover normally from the initial stress-event, but others go on to suffer from CFS/ME in the long term. This, he hypothesises, is due to their belief system (e.g. they develop a fear of exercise, or a belief that they have an incurable organic illness, etc.) So, although he uses the word 'perpetuates', what he actually means is that if you address the faulty belief system, then the illness can be resolved. So, in this case, the word 'perpetuates' is interchangable with 'causes'. It's just that the word 'causes' goes down very badly within the CFS/ME patient community, so he doesn't use it.
This model of illness, that I've described here, is what is outlined in his CFS review paper (not the really weird one, but the slightly more coherent one), which I've mentioned before. From everything I've read, the review paper seems to describe his favoured model of illness.