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“Several years ago I was lecturing in British Columbia. Dr [Simon] Wessely was speaking and he gave a thoroughly enjoyable lecture on M.E. and CFS. He had the hundreds of staff physicians laughing themselves silly over the invented griefs of the M.E. and CFS patients who according to Dr Wessely had no physical illness what so ever but a lot of misguided imagination. I was appalled at his sheer effectiveness, the amazing control he had over the minds of the staid physiciansâ€�.His message was very clear and very simple. If I can paraphrase him: “M.E. and CFS are non-existent illnesses with no pathology what-so-ever. There is no reason why they all cannot return to work tomorrow.

The next morning I left by car with my crew and arrived in Kelowna British Columbia that afternoon. We were staying at a patient’s house who had severe M.E. with dysautanomia and was for all purposes bed ridden or house bound most of the day. That morning she had received a phone call from her insurance company in Toronto. (Toronto is approximately 2742 miles from Vancouver). The insurance call was as follows and again I paraphrase:
“Physicians at a University of British Columbia University have demonstrated that there is no pathological or physiological basis for M.E. or CFS. Your disability benefits have been stopped as of this month. You will have to pay back the funds we have sent you previously. We will contact you shortly with the exact amount you owe us�.

That night I spoke to several patients or their spouses came up to me and told me they had received the same message. They were in understandable fear.

What is important about this story is that at that meeting it was only Dr Wessely who was speaking out against M.E. and CFS and how â€� were the insurance companies in Toronto and elsewhere able to obtain this information and get back to the patients within a 24 hour period if Simon Wessely was not working for the insurance industryâ€� I understand that it was also the insurance industry who paid for Dr Wessely’s trip to Vancouver.”
― Byron Hyde

“It is [Simon] Wessely’s often-unconcealed “derisionâ€� directed towards people with ME -- a disease from which people die and which appears on Coronersâ€� death certificates as the cause of death -- which arouses such anger, an anger that is not confined to patients in the UK but encompasses medical scientists in other countries whose decision-makers have come under Wessely’s thrall.”
― Michael Hanlon

“I have no problem with not understanding the exact mechanism of the symptoms of CFS…I do have a problem with the lack of respect given patients with poorly understood neurological disease.”
― David S. Bell, Faces of CFS

“In July and August 2011 Simon Wessely ran a media campaign with the BBC and the broadsheets, successfully vilifying patients who had justifiably criticised his research. In his case, the marginalisation of ME patients was not ‘unintentionalâ€�. It was active and deliberate.”
― Horace Reid

“The whole idea that you can take a disease like this and exercise your way to health is foolishness. It is insane.”
― Paul Cheney

“The evidence of inflammation in people with ME/CFS is important because the incremental aerobic exercise recommended by the Wessely School and encapsulated in NICE’s Clinical Guideline 53 is contra-indicated in cases of inflamed and damaged tissue and inevitably results in post-exertional relapse with malaise, which is the cardinal symptom of ME/CFS.”
― Margaret Williams

“The pathophysiological consequences of ME/CFS are multi-systemic and may include: immune and neuroendocrine abnormalities; brain dysfunction and neurocognitive defects; cardiovascular and autonomic disturbances; abnormalities in energy production including mitochondrial dysfunction, and changes in the expression of certain genes.”
― Anthony Komaroff

“CBT is a much publicised and debated psychotherapeutic intervention for ME/CFSâ€�.The premise that cognitive therapy (eg. changing ‘illness beliefsâ€�) and graded activity can ‘reverseâ€� or cure this illness is not supported by post-intervention outcome data. In routine medical practice, CBT has not yielded clinically significant outcomes for patients with ME/CFS.”
― Anthony Komaroff

“Many doctors (and medical students) display uncertainty about whether or not CFS/ME is real…Patients with CFS/ME often experience suspicion by health professionals…The (often unintentional) marginalization of many CFS/ME patients represents a failure in medical professionalism, one that may lead to further ethical and practical consequences both for progressive research into CFS/ME and for ethical care...

With one exception, doctors attending the seminar were either defensive or silent. In their eyes, the ME patients present were conforming to stereotype (angry, unscientific, unreasonable) and therefore they â€� the doctors â€� would not engage with them. Paradoxically, these doctors were themselves conforming to another stereotype, as described by the speaker: ‘Knowledge-formation is also influenced by social and cultural factors. Such encounters have an inherent power differential; there is significant potential…to be unjust from an epistemic point of view.”
― Charotte Blease

“For the last 48 years, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) has been formally classified by the World Health Organisation as a neurological disorder but for the last 29 years a group of UK psychiatrists (known as the Wessely School) have denied it exists other than as an aberrant belief; they insist that it is a mental (behavioural) disorder that can be cured by graded exercise and “cognitive re-structuringâ€�.”
― Margaret Williams

“It’s absolutely retrogressive to suggest [ME] CFS is in the heads of patients. I have seen patients commit suicide, or have been otherwise destroyed, because some professor has diagnosed them as having a psychiatric illness.”
― Peter Behan

“people with ME/CFS do not have “fatigue as their main symptomâ€�; they have post-extertional fatigability accompanied by malaise as their main symptom (their voluntary muscles do not work properly and are exquisitely painful after exercise)”
― Margaret Williams

“(The blood vessels) must be constricted so tight in the brain that little blood gets through. Perhaps it is one of the hormones that constricts blood vessels. Perhaps an infection of the blood vessels. Perhaps it is an excessive sensitivity of the blood vessels to adrenalineâ€�.CFS is a devastating physiologic process that undermines the body’s energy and the brain’s cognitive abilityâ€�.CFS is not…an illness behaviour for lazy people. The consequences of this illness weigh heavily not only on the victim, but also on family, community and society.”
― David S. Bell, Faces of CFS

“The most important limitation of [clinical] guidelines is that the recommendations may be wrong... Practices that are sub-optimal from the patient’s perspective may be recommended to help control costs, serve societal needs, or protect special interests (those of doctors…or politicians, for example).”
― Steven H. Woolf

“It [ME] is one of the most disabling diseases that I care for, far exceeding HIV disease except for the terminal stages.”
― Daniel L. Peterson

“Individuals are often stigmatized and told their illness isn’t realâ€� People with [ME] CFS face an incredible burden just getting doctors to take their symptoms seriously”
― Barry E. Hurwitz