Sorry I’ve not been blogging recently. I put the blog to one side to concentrate on another project but I didn’t realise how long it would take. Needing to take breaks every five minutes to replenish my brain when I’m writing doesn’t make for speedy progress. Today, however, it has been May 12, ME Awareness Day, and I managed to share a link to Robert Saunders’ excellent ME-related version of Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’ on my (mainly non-ME specific) Facebook page. I read what I’d written to introduce the piece again just now and decided it was worth sharing it here too. If you’re involved in the ME world in some way, you’ve probably come across Robert’s splendid video already, but if not then do please take five minutes to listen – and maybe to share it with others.
Here (for a change) is the non-Facebook version of Robert’s introduction to the video.
Even if you think you know something about ME, some of the quotes used in the video may surprise you:
‘I split my clinical time between ME/CFS and HIV and I can tell you if I had to choose between the two illnesses, I’d rather have HIV.’ – Dr Nancy Klimas, Director, Institute of Neuro Immune Medicine, NSU.
‘People with ME are more disabled and have a lower quality of life than people with most other chronic illnesses including heart disease and multiple sclerosis.’
‘When the full details of the PACE Trial become known, it will be considered one of the biggest medical scandals if the 21st century.’ Carole Monaghan, UK MP
The PACE Trial spent £5m of UK taxpayers’ money and purported to illustrate the effectiveness of graded exercise therapy for ME. However, it was eventually discovered to be so full of flaws that it is now being taught in some university courses as an example of how not to do research. In spite of this, PACE is still highly influential worldwide, including here in the UK, its researchers being so embedded in the higher echelons of the medical establishment that mere facts seem to do nothing to damage their ‘credibility’ in the eyes of their peers.
Time and again, the faults and subterfuge which lie behind PACE have been laid bare, first by patients – many working from their sick beds – and more recently by commentators such as Dr David Tuller who have taken the trouble to look at the evidence and understand that the trial, and the biopsychosocial theory which underlies it, need to be exposed as the sham that they are. Time and again, the argument is won, and the PACE researchers are left mumbling the same excuses which didn’t hold water the last time around, yet to change the consensus view of the illness appears to take decades rather than years. Press coverage is slowly improving but the PACE researchers have a powerful lobbying group, the Science Media Centre, on their side, and though journalists are often well meaning, their idea of balance seems to be to present both sides of the argument, irrespective of where the truth may lie. The equivalent of most articles about ME would be a feature on the shape of the planet which gave equal time and weight to the views of the Flat Earth Society.
As the song puts it:
How many times must an idea fail
Before it is seen to be flawed?
How many flaws can a Trial embrace
Before it is seen as a fraud?
So the process of exposing the truth is an arduous one and of course people with ME have little energy to spare. We fight the illness as best we can but it is a cruel truth that we also have to fight an intransigent medical establishment. Thank goodness for those few healthy people who are willing to help us.
The slow process of getting to the truth has to go on. Graded exercise as promoted by PACE is very dangerous for people with ME. It can – and does – leave patients bedbound, sometimes permanently so. Not only that but the persistent presence of the biopsychosocial lobby means that most research money, especially here in the UK, goes into various ‘rehabilitation’ research programs such as PACE rather than into much needed biomedical research.
Of the 14 million people worldwide estimated to have ME, about 25% are housebound or bedbound, many as a result of graded exercise programs. Many of these severely affected can’t tolerate light so they spend their lives in darkened rooms. Some are not even well enough to talk to those close to them, so they Iive lives of total isolation.
The photos in the video illustrate the worlds of a solitary room in which many such people must live. When the song talks of people screaming in the dark then, it is not exaggeration – except that in reality the scream will most likely be a silent one.
Thanks for listening and reading. Please help by sharing this. Thanks, too, to Robert Saunders and all involved in making this powerful video.
How many times must a story be told
Before you will see what is true?
Further reading:
David Tuller’s initial analysis of PACE. Just reading the summary gives you a good understanding of the scale of the ‘errors’ involved:
Out of the Blue: an account of what it can be like to go down with ME – and a few useful links (from the Spoonseeker blog):
spoonseekerdotcom 