What do you do if your local MP is Iain Duncan Smith - The Work and Pensions Secretary who has designed the biggest shake-up of welfare system in decades. What the hell do i say to him? How do i get to see him, and even if i did see him he wouldn't listen anyway. He's the one cutting benefits under the new system.
Well I might come across as naive about the Tories, which I'm not, but it has seemed to me that there might be one slight window of opportunity for us. A major principle they have stated for their health policy is to put power back in the hands of the patients, and to give patients and doctors more freedom of choice as to how they spend their funds and what treatments they prefer. Now I imagine that is mostly about something like some kind of fund-holding trick to enable doctors to get rich quick, and of course the budget is going to shrink massively and that's got to be a big part of it too - but at least on the face of it, greater freedom of choice and devolution of power back to local level should in theory be part of what the Conservatives are supposed to be about, especially after an era of centralisation and strong state control. Those nasty NICE guidelines remain in place of course, and Dr Myhill remains unable to prescribe thanks to a vindictive witchhunt in the dying days of the outgoing administration, but still...there should at least be a theoretical opportunity in those alleged principles of greater individual empowerment.
I would be making the argument that with greater freedom for doctors and patients to pursue alternative treatments to CBT/GET, there's at least a chance that
some patients might actually get a little better and be able to resume a more productive place in society and get off welfare benefits (for those that can get them, of course) - and failing that, the private and alternative practitioners are at least a private enterprise that would be encouraged.
I'd mention that New Labour's dominant and rigid system for heatlhcare needs rolling back and opening up, and that maybe certain physicians currently outside the NICE guidelines could be allowed to practice again, perhaps with an element of public/private mixture - ie. patients would get some sort of voucher towards the cost of the private healthcare solution of their choice. I'd also point out that any sign of moves in this direction could be a big vote-winner for the Conservatives amongst ME/CFS patients.
Of course one would have to warn IDS that the distinction between benefit scroungers and ME/CFS patients could be hard to make, though I have no easy solutions to that conundrum - you could mention the tests that aren't currently available in the UK.
And finally, I wouldn't be able to resist the argument that if his government is looking for an area to cut, they could do a lot worse than to examine the expanding army of psychologists and Wessely's CBT/GET approach. The involvement of former Revolutionary Communist Party Members in founding and running the Science Media Centre might be something else they could be interested in rooting out as well, since their re-worked ideology is avowedly to 'destroy the environmentalist movement' and wage war on the planet, and Cameron at least likes to be seen as a green.
So oddly enough, in our topsy-turvey world there could be some positives to pursue - and after all, it's not like the NHS is offering us anything at all at the moment, so we've nothing to lose, really. And if you don't look hard for the positives in life, you're unlikely to stumble across them by chance...
More on how New Labour's UK Science Media Centre controls media reporting of science, and the agenda of infiltrators from Living Marxism to enable unfettered scientific progress by disregarding and concealing the victims of experimental science and environmental illnesses, here:
http://www.forums.aboutmecfs.org/sh...ce-Media-Centre-RCP-and-press-silence-on-XMRV
My post #50 on that thread quotes from LobbyWatch to set out just how drastically their hidden agenda is opposed to our interests.
