Tag: IAPT

Sadly, COVID-19 Could Just Be The Start Of Your Problems..

I know you have enough to worry about already with the pandemic situation the way it is, but there is something else important that you should know. The sad truth is that if you get COVID – 19 and survive, it could just be the start of your problems.

Ever since we first heard of this new virus, those of us who have experienced ongoing life-altering symptoms over many years following viral infection have feared that it would leave a great many more people in a similar condition to ourselves. It gives me no satisfaction whatsoever to report that this appears to be the way things are heading.

This thread from Reddit contains a distressing discussion between a great many previously fit and healthy young people who have all been left in a similar situation by COVID – 19, experiencing not the mild illness they were led to expect but a much more severe set of symptoms which, even after eight weeks or so, don’t seem to be going away.

As if this was not disturbing enough, they often find themselves treated with scepticism by doctors, who refuse to investigate their ongoing physical symptoms, referring them instead for talking therapies such as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) which are more usually associated with mental health problems. Employers, friends, and even family can often be equally disbelieving. “My mother has basically disowned me,“ reports one young man of 33.  These people are finding themselves in a living nightmare and cannot understand the lack of concern.

“Why is the media focusing on mortality figures for the old and infirm when it should be educating on the potential long-term health risks to all ages?” asks Golden_Pothos, who starts off the thread.

Well, since I started writing this post, several mainly well-informed articles about the potential long-term effects of COVID – 19 have appeared and let’s hope more will follow, but the broader answer is that the media have conspired for some time with successive governments in downplaying the potential severity of chronic illness, the existence of which appears to be regarded not so much as a human tragedy but an expensive inconvenience. The government’s official terminology is carefully chosen to reflect this perspective. So we find that people aren’t paid ‘incapacity benefit’ any more but ‘employment support allowance’. The implication of the name is that if an illness doesn’t kill you, you will make a full recovery. All you need is support until you are well enough to return to full employment. This is the climate in which it is okay for people with undeniably progressive conditions such as Motor Neurone Disease to be sent for benefit assessments in case they have got better.

Unfortunately this perspective from the politicians is supported by the decades old beliefs of the medical profession itself, which over a great many years has tended to treat any new and novel condition not with curiosity but with scepticism. Epilepsy, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinsons Disease, even stomach ulcers have been dismissed as ‘somatised’ conditions invented by the mind rather than real physical dysfunctions deserving investigation. In every case, as medical knowledge has progressed, these conditions have eventually been revealed as the physical problems they always were, but this hasn’t stopped the next new illness to come along being trivialised and dismissed in exactly the same way, the doctors seemingly unable to tolerate a situation in which real physical conditions exist which they don’t understand.

In 1955, following an infectious outbreak affecting 292 members of staff at the Royal Free Hospital in London, many of those affected experienced symptoms which waxed and waned over a long period and the term myalgic encephalomyelitis (or M.E. for short) was coined to describe the condition. To start with, it was acknowledged as a neurological condition affecting multiple bodily systems but a few years later, in 1970, two psychiatrists McEvedy and Beard, took a new look at the case and, without interviewing or examining any of the patients involved, reached the new conclusion that it had all been a case of “epidemic hysteria”, one of the principal arguments for which they cited as “the high attack rate in females compared to males”. So it was that M.E. joined the long list of conditions mentioned above, dismissed as “medically unexplained” because it was yet to be fully understood by medical science.

Skip ahead to 1984 and a similar realignment in perspective was performed in the USA following an outbreak at Incline Village, where the term M.E. was discarded in favour of CFS or ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’. This was a name apparently intended to trivialise the condition, for ‘fatigue‘ in no way comes close to describing the extreme exhaustion and multifarious other symptoms which those with M.E. report. The name change certainly spread confusion, with some believing the two conditions to be one and the same and others to be two separate entities. To make matters worse, CFS is widely confused with the term “chronic fatigue”, which is actually just a symptom present in many different conditions rather than the name of any specific one. Add to this a baffling number of different diagnostic criteria, some more usually interpreted as M.E. and others as CFS, with certain researchers apparently happy to come up with more variations from time to time just for the sake of it, and you find yourself with a very confused picture. It is hard to work out exactly how all these complications have come about. It is almost as though the powers that be were trying to deliberately muddy the waters to impede progress – but surely that not could not be the case?!

In the years since CFS was ‘invented’, a small group of British psychiatrists has made it very much their own, promoting the use of GET (graded exercise therapy) and CBT to treat it. They argue that patients are kept ill not by any ongoing disease process but by ‘abnormal illness beliefs’ and deconditioning due to inactivity. All they need is a course of graded exercise, with associated CBT to encourage it, and they will be up and about again.

Patients strongly reject this theory, many having submitted in good faith to just such a programme of graded exercise only to find that it brought about a long term and sometimes even permanent deterioration in their condition. Patients were therefore astounded when a large scale trial in 2011 claimed to prove that graded exercise and CBT were effective treatments for the condition.

PACE was a £5 million government Trial (funded in part – uniquely for a clinical trial – by the Department of and Work and Pensions). It is the most expensive piece of research into CFS/ME ever conducted and was intended to provide a definitive answer to the question of how the condition should be managed. At first, it seemed to have done exactly that but when first patients and then other scientists and health professionals looked more closely, the trial was found to have a great many flaws.

Just to state a few of them briefly:

  • The researchers made changes to their assessment criteria such that patients could be sick enough to enter the trial and then get worse yet still be classed as ‘recovered’ at the end of it.
  • The unblinded trial relied on subjective assessments of success, with objective assessments included in the original protocol (such as returning to work) being dismissed by the researchers as irrelevant or unreliable.
  • During the trial, participants received a newsletter extolling the virtues and success of the very therapies they were supposed to be assessing.
  • The researchers’ conflicts of interest were not divulged to participants when they entered the trial.
  • One of the criteria used for patient inclusion in the study was the Oxford definition, since dismissed in the US National Institutes of Health report into M.E. as harmful and in need of retirement.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of flaws but it gives you a flavour of the quality of the trial, which is now being taught in some US colleges as a text book example of how not to do science. Following the disclosure of these various issues, a number of letters have been sent to the editor of The Lancet (where the trial’s first paper was published), asking for an independent reanalysis of the study. The most recent of these was signed by over 150 health professionals, scientists, members of parliament, and patient organisations worldwide. In spite of the great weight of evidence in support of such reanalysis, no direct response to these letters has been received.

It seems astonishing that the PACE study is so flawed and has clearly been shown to be flawed but the editor of the supposedly distinguished journal which published it seems to feel no need to respond its critics. Similarly the PACE researchers themselves continue to act as though nothing has changed, still insisting that the PACE study is fine and they have done nothing wrong. How can this be explained?

It seems to be partly due to the power of the establishment here in the UK. The PACE researchers and their colleagues are highly regarded individuals. They are believed to be right by those in authority simply because of who they are. That they should finesse the figures the way they appear to have done is considered unthinkable, so their friends in power refuse to believe it is true. They certainly wouldn’t stoop so low as to look at the facts involved. We may think we have evidence-based medicine in this country but what we really have is eminence-based medicine, the fundamental principle of which is that eminent doctors cannot be wrong.  It will take rather more than the truth to bring them down.

And then there is the all-important matter of economics. It is much cheaper to send patients for six week courses of CBT than it is to accept that we have on our hands a poorly understood organic illness requiring proper investigation, research and ultimately treatment. From the perspective of those in power, the country could not afford for PACE to be wrong, any more than we could afford for COVID – 19 to be a genuine threat, which is why our government pretended it wasn’t until the sheer weight of deaths forced them to change their minds. Deaths cannot be ignored but sadly chronic illness can, and it all too often is .

In recent years however, at least outside Britain, some advances have finally been made in the battle to address the true nature of M.E. The US Pathways to Prevention and Institute of Medicine  reports, while not helpful in every respect, have recognised both the potential severity of the condition and the fact that it is not psychiatric – or psychological – in origin. The funds for research that were promised have been slow to follow but perhaps they will come in time.

Even in Britain, the NICE guidelines for the treatment of M.E. are being reassessed and there is a chance, albeit a slender one, that the recommendation of graded exercise will be withdrawn, just as it has in the US. If this happens, however, its proponents will not be in too much despair. They have long since had other plans in mind.

As long ago as 1997, they were were writing: “we regard chronic fatigue syndrome as important… because it provides an example for the positive management of medically unexplained illness in general.”

You can understand the appeal for them of unleashing their ‘expertise’ on this broader pool of patients. While only a relatively small proportion of people in the country have ME/CFS, a much larger number purportedly suffer with MUS.  A key 2001 study by Nimnuan, Wessely, and Hotopf concluded that no less than 52% of patients who were newly referred to secondary care outpatient clinics had medically unexplained symptoms. Moreover, it has been quoted that people of working age with medically unexplained symptoms consume 10% of all NHS expenditure. Clearly if these figures are correct (which they almost certainly aren’t,  but more about that later) the scope of MUS greatly exceeds that of the mere 0.25 million people in the country who are thought to suffer with M.E.

It will not be surprising then that new services for MUS are being rolled out to address this supposed need. The Guidelines for Commissioners of Services for Patients with MUS (2017) propose the instigation of MUS services in both hospitals and the community to manage patients with MUS, directing them away from costly referrals, medical investigations and interventions with long hospital stays, and instead giving them lower cost mental health treatments like CBT.

It might be argued that this will cause genuine physical illnesses to be overlooked by doctors, many of whom have already been persuaded that 50% of their patients aren’t really ill and are therefore preoccupied in trying to identify which ones they are, and it might be reasonably supposed that some patients will die as a result, but never mind: the end result will undoubtedly be less expensive.

Neurology attracts special attention in the new crusade against MUS, having been identified as having one of the highest proportions (at 62%) of patients with MUS in the study by Nimnuan, Wessely, and Hotopf. Patients attending with neurological symptoms which do not accord with any recognised pathology are therefore extremely likely to be diagnosed with FND, short for ’functional neurological disorder’ and very much the diagnosis du jour. They will then be referred to one of the new FND clinics that have opened across the country, where they will undergo CBT and also most likely be investigated for deep-seated underlying trauma, a therapy which patients with M.E. have mainly been spared but which is currently gaining in popularity. These patients, who like those with M.E., may well have been waiting some years for a diagnosis, will be reassured that their illness is being taken seriously at last – after all, the word ‘functional’ makes it sound like it is real, does it not? But in fact, the opposite is the case. The corridors of social media currently ring with frantic arguments between patients who believe that FND is a ‘proper diagnosis’ and those who know that it isn’t.

Divide and rule.

The MUS offensive is being pursued on many different fronts, including that of IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies), the programme originally intended to ensure that patients received therapies for mental health problems such as anxiety and depression which all too often had gone untreated. Its extension to cover long-term conditions and MUS has raised concerns, however,  and an audit by Michael J Scott has suggested that the therapies used (principally CBT) come nowhere near achieving the 50% curative rate which has been claimed for them.

As essentially the same group of researchers is involved, it is perhaps not surprising that the work on MUS appears to be full of similar flaws to those which beset the PACE Trial. Take the Nimnuan, Wessely, and Hotopf study mentioned earlier. In a previous article on this blog, I made some suggestions about why the numbers of patients with MUS might well have been over-estimated (please scroll down to the paragraph beginning “Is all this really true?” ) and a recent article by a patient argues that account has not been taken of the substantial amounts of misdiagnosis which were involved.

Meanwhile, David Tuller, the US public health lecturer who has done so much to publicise the shortcomings of the PACE Trial, has been looking at a study of CBT for IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) this having been identified as a form of MUS. Tuller points out that the IBS Symptom Severity Scale used to assess the effects of CBT compared to ‘treatment as usual’ in the study required a difference of 50 points or more to be considered clinically significant. In fact, only one of the two types of CBT which were tested in the study achieved symptom improvement in excess of 50 in the 12 months follow up, and neither exceeded 50 in the long term assessment after 24 months. In spite of these results, the use of CBT for IBS has been heralded as a great success.

Tuller has also highlighted a gross and continually perpetuated error concerning the overall impact of MUS. A 2010 study by Bermingham et al concluded that MUS accounted for around 10% of NHS expenditure on people of working age. However, Professor Chew- Graham, one of the leading proponents of psychological therapies for MUS, quoted this a little differently, stating that people of working age with MUS accounted for 10% of total NHS expenditure. Unfortunately, this misreading has since been repeated many times over by Professor Chew-Graham and others such that the impact of MUS on the NHS budget has been grossly exaggerated in influential places over a long period of time.

In a recent Skype talk to the Sheffield ME Group, Tuller recounted his attempts to get some of these mistakes corrected and the editors’ lack of urgency or concern to get them changed. It is as if the facts don’t matter to them, as if they are only going through the motions of proving their case. You can understand how they might start to develop that mindset. It does indeed seem that those in power are so desperate for easy, cheap answers to difficult questions that they will soak up any old nonsense as long as the price tag is right.

It is too early to say how many of those with post-viral symptoms from COVID-19 will go on to develop M.E, but in a climate like this, is there any hope that they will be taken seriously if they do? Is it not much more likely that they too will be trivialised and fobbed off with CBT, that they too will be pushed into graded exercise, only to find that it makes their condition worse? In the aftermath of the pandemic, there will be too many other concerns to address, and less money to spare than ever. It seems too much to hope that those in power will come to their senses and take a proper, responsible look at the claims of the snake oil salesmen who are taking them for a ride, meanwhile condemning so many people with overlooked physical illness to lives of relentless ill health.

Notes:

1)        It is frequently claimed that people with M.E. do not want to be given a mental health diagnosis because of the stigma involved. In actual fact, they simply do not want to be given an inappropriate diagnosis. There is widespread evidence of ongoing organic pathology in M.E. but none to support the deconditioning theory of the graded exercise proponents.

2)        In particular, research has shown that people with M.E. have an abnormal response to exercise, producing excess lactic acid and, in a cardiopulmonary exercise test, uniquely performing less well on the second day of exercise.

3)        You can find a summary of what biomedical research tells us about M.E. here.

4)        ‘Medically Unexplained Symptoms’ are not necessarily unexplainable. They simply have not been explained by our current state of medical knowledge and testing ability. To assume they are therefore a mental health issue is simply that, an assumption. There is no evidence to support it.

5)        I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with CBT therapy per se. I am sure it can be an effective treatment for mental health problems. There is no evidence, however, that it is a universal panacea, which is how it is currently being touted.

 

 

Probing the Holes in MUS

This is the second in a new series of posts about medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). The first of these, A Morass of MUS, appeared last time. However, I first looked at medically unexplained symptoms over two years ago in a post called Medically Unexplained Assumptions. In this, I travelled all the way back to the nineteenth century (just like a character from Netflix) to take a look at the case of the unfortunate Mr Le Log, who suffered memory loss, paralysis and seizures after being knocked to the ground by a speeding carriage.

The accident was unfortunate of course but what made things worse for Le Log was that he had no external head injuries. He most likely had internal ones, but at that time medical science did not recognise the existence of such injuries as they didn’t have the technology to detect them. As far as the doctor who examined him was concerned, therefore, there couldn’t possibly be any physical reason for Le Log’s symptoms of memory loss etc. The doctor could only conclude that they were the result of ‘hysteria’.

In the many years since then, similar assumptions have been made about many other presentations of symptoms, such as those relating to epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and Parkinsons disease, to name but a few, yet subsequent advances in technology have revealed that these conditions too are really physical in nature and have nothing to do with ‘hysteria’ at all.

The habit of assuming that any condition which is not understood by doctors  must be a rooted in mental health continues to this day, however. It has been shown to be wrong over and over again, and you would have thought that gradually, over the years, it would have fallen into disuse. But no. The medical profession continue to insist that they already know everything there is to know about illness, so any set of symptoms they don’t understand can’t possibly be a ‘proper’ disease – this in spite of the fact that they really know they don’t know everything, and are happy enough to admit this in other contexts.

The word ‘hysterical’ is rarely used these days, but plenty of other names have come along to replace it in describing such conditions: medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), which we are using here, is one of them, as are the terms ‘functional‘ and ‘somatised’. ‘Functional’ is especially misleading, I think, as it sounds like it is describing a physical fault in a system. (You could almost think that doctors were deliberately setting out to mislead their patients…)

Far from falling into disuse, these terms seem to be gaining in popularity at the moment. As I mentioned last time, up to 45% of GP appointments and half of all new hospital visits are now considered to be due to MUS. This really is an extraordinarily large number, and new MUS services are being encouraged into existence to deal with it all. The IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) scheme, originally intended to address anxiety and depression, is now being extended to deal with MUS (and long term conditions). Nimnuan, Wessely, and Hotopf, authors of the paper “Medically Unexplained Symptoms -an epidemiological study in seven specialties” which seems to have been the source of the ‘50% of hospital visits’ figure, announce rather grandly: “It is now time to acknowledge that the management of medically unexplained symptoms is one of the important tasks facing the specialist in internal medicine – indeed, in some clinics, it constitutes the majority of the work.”

Is all this really true? Is the vast mountain of MUS that Wessely et al have brought to our attention real? Sir Simon Wessely’s presence amongst the authors of the ‘seven specialties’ paper was bound to increase my doubts about this, especially bearing in mind his favourable opinion of the calamitous PACE trial. So I was interested to take a look at how he and his colleagues arrived at their figures for the prevalence of MUS .

I found I had a number of concerns:

“Medically unexplained symptoms were defined as any current principal somatic complaint reported by patients for which no definite medical diagnosis could be found by physical examination and appropriate investigation… The physician’s opinion was determined by the final diagnosis stated in the clinical case notes. If the physicians gave a diagnosis of “functional,” or continued to defer the diagnosis because of no detected abnormality, we considered these as indicating that the symptoms were medically unexplained… Case notes were reviewed to ascertain the final diagnosis approx three months after the initial visit.”

So in other words, if the doctor hasn’t come up with an explanation for a symptom in three months, then it is officially “medically unexplained” as far as this research is concerned. The problem for me here is that, in my experience, most diagnoses take longer than three months to obtain, so this three month cut-off seems unreasonable and likely to exaggerate the extent of the MUS problem.

  • The researchers developed a ‘system review questionnaire’ for use in the study but I haven’t been able to find it online. They describe it as follows:

“It consists of 11 main symptoms, which correspond to 13 recognised functional somatic syndromes, with 25 additional symptoms, including somatic symptoms, sleep, and psychological complaints. A total of 27 individual somatic symptoms were enquired about.“

I don’t find that all that easy to interpret, so it’s a shame we don’t have a copy of the questionnaire. But the impression I get is that if a patient has at least one of those 27 individual somatic symptoms which has not been ‘explained’ by the doctor by the time the 3 months are up, then they will be categorised as having medically unexplained symptoms. In my opinion, however, it is a natural part of the human condition to have one or two aches and pains and other bodily malfunctions of unknown origin at any one time. So it seems to me that once again these figures will be inflated. (If you would like to take a look at this for yourself and see if you think I am representing it correctly, then please do so. The full paper is freely available online.)

  • As quoted above, the 11 “main symptoms“ correspond to “13 recognised functional somatic syndromes”. Not all of these are named in the paper but three of them are mentioned in the introduction:  IBS, fibromyalgia, and – you guessed it –  CFS. Well the World Health Organisation classes IBS as ‘a disease of the intestines’, and fibromyalgia as a ‘soft tissue disorder’. They have nothing to say about CFS but myalgic encephalomyelitis is a classed as a neurological condition of course and as the Department of Health apparently believes ME and CFS to be one and the same, a strong case could be made for CFS to be also classed as neurological. I can only presume that a patient presenting with the symptoms of any one of the ’13 recognised functional somatic syndromes’ mentioned would be categorised as ‘unexplained’ by the researchers. However, as the three ‘syndromes’ mentioned are in fact officially recognised as ‘somatic’ (ie physical) conditions, a case could be made that once again the number of patients with MUS are being inflated – and we haven’t even looked at the remaining so called ‘functional somatic syndromes’ yet. The chances are that some of those aren’t really ‘functional’ either. Is it reasonable of the government to recognise medical conditions as physical yet at the same time class them as MUS in the supporting statistics for a major initiative to expand services for such conditions? I don’t think it is.

So where does this leave us exactly? While this isn’t all as clear as I would like it to be, I feel there’s enough here to place a big question mark against these figures. If I was relying on them to support a substantial government initiative, I think I’d want to take a very good look at them first. Likewise the supporting figures for primary care. Has anyone done so? I wonder. They may well have simply relied on peer review to validate the research, but that didn’t work so well for PACE, did it?

While we’re on the subject of diagnosis: last time, I drew attention to some advice for GPs which seemed to suggest they should place undue focus on the mental health of patients presenting with physical symptoms in order not to miss any cases of MUS. If you’ve read the second of my original posts on MUS, ‘Unexplained, Misdiagnosed, Untreated‘, you’ll also know that MUS has been a substantial factor in the misdiagnosis of rare conditions, sometimes causing catastrophic delays in treatment. But there are also other concerns, most notably a gaping logistical gap which appears to lie at the very centre of the MUS strategy as it is described in the Guidelines for Commissioners (the very document which, supposedly, is supposed to kickstart the new range of services for MUS into action).

As I mentioned last time, MUS are described in these guidelines as: ‘bodily complaints for which adequate examination does not reveal sufficient explanatory structural or other specified pathology’. A similar definition was used by Wessely et al in their paper above. All this may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but if you think about it more carefully, you might start to wonder ‘how sufficient is ‘sufficient’ and ‘how adequate is ‘adequate’? As far as I can tell, the guidelines give no guidance on that. They do however warn against the danger of over-investigation. They say:

“Patients are often subjected to repeated diagnostic investigations, and unnecessary and costly referrals and interventions”

and

“Doctors can cause harm by pursuing inappropriate investigations in their efforts to discover the cause of symptoms. Such procedures can exacerbate anxiety. Over-investigation may cause unnecessary damage to healthy tissues and lead to over-treatment, including unknecessary surgery, with all its complications, and in extreme cases more invasive treatments such as urinary catheters and tube feeding, of various types. Doctors may also prescribe unnecessary medication that can lead to side effects, and addiction.”

Forgive me, but that last paragraph reads like a text book example of catastrophising, something I am led to believe is more typical of a MUS patient than a set of NHS guidelines. I suppose a doctor would explain it as follows: “I’m sorry Mr Smith but it’s really best if we don’t give you a gastroscopy to investigate your stomach pains or you’re very likely to end up in bed with several organs accidentally removed, being drip fed unnecessary medication. What would you like us to give you instead to help with your constant agonising pain: CBT or mindfulness?”

I’m not sure this is really striking a realistic balance between ‘adequate examination‘ and ‘over-investigation’. It’s more like freezing to death for fear of catching fire if you light a match.

The truth is that the more adequate the examination, the more likely it is to find sufficient pathology if it is present. But the guidelines stress again and again the need for less investigation. Is there not a danger of an enormous void opening up here, a void into which the physically ill may fall? Those whose pathology is overlooked by tests which turn out not to have been so adequate after all? Always assuming, of course, that they even managed to get a test. ‘Repeated tests’ seem to be especially frowned upon by the guidelines, so if you’ve been tested before, you may not get another chance. The impression given, rightly or wrongly, is that the NHS will no longer cater for patients who develop pathology for which they’ve previously been tested. Unless you want CBT of course, in which case your brand new local MUS clinic will be happy to help.

This is especially concerning in the light of the guidelines’ acceptance that ‘MUS may be caused by physiological disturbance, emotional problems or pathological conditions which have not yet been diagnosed’. (My italics.) For if that is indeed the case, there’s a problem, isn’t there? With all this desire to avoid investigation, how are these conditions which have not yet been diagnosed going to get diagnosed – especially once a patient has been judged to have MUS? I can find no answer to this important question in the guidelines. But it is a life-threatening question and surely one which requires an answer….

I’d like to complete this post with a brief overview of the current situation, as regards both MUS and IAPT. The underlying principles behind the original IAPT scheme seem to me to be praiseworthy: delivering therapies for mental health problems such as anxiety and depression which previously all too often went untreated. There are concerns, however, especially regarding the expansion of IAPT to include MUS and long term conditions. The official guide to this new ‘care pathway’, for instance, cites CFS as a MUS condition, repeating the error from the ‘seven specialties’ paper but this time in a government document; while IAPT as a whole is also under scrutiny following an audit by Michael J Scott which suggests that the therapies used (principally CBT) come nowhere near achieving the 50% curative rate which is claimed for them. This concern is covered in detail in the latest issue of the Journal of Health Psychology (ed David F Marks). 

As for MUS, if we stand back and look at the overall picture of that, is there even greater cause for concern? Not only must we have the same worries about the efficacy of the therapies, surely questions must be asked sooner or later about the vast numbers which are supposed to be affected by this phenomenon and the effect on the diagnosis of physical/somatic conditions if undue emphasis is placed on it.

Put in a single sentence, the question is this: do we have a situation where a massive new initiative is being rolled out to promote therapies with exaggerated efficacy for the purpose of combating an imaginary epidemic, at the same time encouraging doctors to overlook and under-investigate genuine pathologies?

Only asking…