Sir Professor Simon Wessely's 12-page of notes for his lecture denigrating ME patients

[Countrygirl]

https://web.archive.org/web/20060201004220im_/http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/wessely_speech_120594.htm

Here is an interesting trip down memory lane for those who have had ME for decades.

It is Professor Sir Simon Wessely's twelve pages of notes for a lecture he gave on ME in 1994 where he developed his claim that ME is just an idea, not an illness or a disease. It was at this time that a few of us also received threatening legal letters informing us that he would sue us if we criticised him or supported any criticism of him. Others of us received alarming threatening phone calls that warned us of harm being inflicted on us by (direct quote) 'people on high who have the power to do you great harm' if we didn't stop our advocacy for ME. (The politics and history of ME are very murky and should be thoroughly investigated and recorded. ) It was also about this time that SW (who was or is a member of this forum) gave a series of lectures in Canada ridiculing severely ill ME patients that had the doctors rolling in the aisles with laughter, according to Dr Byron Hyde. The following day, as a result of the contents of this lecture, patients had their insurance and benefits removed.

The notes are another piece of our history that traces the burial of ME over the last 40 years.

 

[Osaca]

Wessely himself and his friends and companions like Hans Knoop, Judith Rosmalen and Michael Sharpe are still pushing their agenda and receiving multimillion funds. They have recently changed gears by combining biomedical research with GET and CBT. To achieve results they muddy the water by using absurd and psychological patient selection criteria and then present the research as if it was valuable research for ME/CFS. If you're not at least using the Canadian criteria, you're not doing research, but pseudoscience. Simple as that.

 

[LINE]

It is pretty obvious that these people know very little about biochemistry or at the very least, genetics. If anyone is going to comment on a topic, they should be educated.

 

[Osaca]

It is pretty obvious that these people know very little about biochemistry or at the very least, genetics. If anyone is going to comment on a topic, they should be educated.

They never pretended to be strong biomedical researchers, biochemists or geneticists.

They can simply attempt to apply their BPS model to any disease as long as a clear biomedical biomarker doesn't exist. If their BPS models doesn't work in the treatment they simply manipulate the outcome data or the diagnostic selection criteria. Both are things they have done in the past and are continuing to do with the multimillion Euro grants that they've recently received.

Critising the BPS model itself isn't fruiful for ME/CFS, it's simply a model. We have to criticise the patient diagnostic criteria they use (they don't use the Canadian consensus criteria and instead use psychological criteria) and other unscientifc methods they use. This is something David Tuller has been doing extremely well. At the same time we have to also criticise biomedical research for ME/CFS that doesn't at least use the Canadian consensus criteria as it otherwise leaves room for this poorly conducted research by Wessely and co.