Tag: Oxford criteria

The OMEGA Petition – Email to Professor Holgate

This email has been sent to Professor Holgate of MEGA. Many thanks to all those who signed. (Whoops! missed a few… Total signatures now updated to 221)

((Please note that we are not the organisers of the OMEGA petition.))

Dear Professor Holgate – We comprise a number of M.E. patients and carers, 218 in all. Please see our signatures at the end of this email..

We are writing because we notice your suggestion in your letter to Professor Jonathan Edwards that OMEGA (the petition opposing the MEGA study) has attracted so many signatures due to the support of Invest In ME. We are writing to assure you that we patients and carers are able to look at the evidence and make up our own minds on such issues.

Here are some of the grave concerns that we have about the MEGA study as it has been proposed. It seems likely that you have heard many of them before but in view of your professed perplexity about the OMEGA petition, we want to make sure you are aware of the issues. For the same reason, we are copying this to the other members of the MEGA team and to those you copied in to your letter to Professor Edwards. We are also sending a copy to Professor Edwards himself, and the email will be posted online at the Spoonseeker blog.

Our concerns about MEGA include the following:

Patients from the NHS CFS/ME clinics (apparently the intended source for MEGA) will not yield a representative sample of people with M.E. The reasons for this include:

  • Most severely affected patients cannot access the clinics and so will not be included in the study.
  • There will be an inevitable selection bias towards the mildly affected because
    • the clinics will tend to select such patients as those most likely to respond to the behavioural therapies on offer, and
    • the more severely affected patients will be more likely to reject such therapies – and hence the clinics – as inappropriate.
  • Other more severely affected patients will no longer be on the clinic’s system
    • either because they have not responded well to the therapies, dropped out, and not been followed up (as feedback suggests is often the case) or
    • they are among the long term sick who are no longer on the system because treatment is time-restricted

There has been a suggestion, following representations from patients, Continue reading “The OMEGA Petition – Email to Professor Holgate”

Letter to Dr Phil Hammond

Following last Saturday’s interview with Prof Esther Crawley on BBC Radio Bristol, I sent the following letter to Dr Phil Hammond who hosted the programme. I think it explains a large part of the reason why patients with M.E. have problems with Dr Crawley and why we don’t want her involved with the proposed MEGA study:

Dear Dr Hammond

Thank you for putting the concerns of ME/CFS patients to Prof Esther Crawley in your interview on Radio Bristol last Saturday. Unfortunately, as I have tried to explain as briefly as possible below, her responses were largely factually incorrect. I wonder if next time you have her on your programme, you could also invite the investigative journalist David Tuller whose original in-depth analysis brought the many and in some cases outrageous defects of the PACE Trial to wider attention. This led to numerous condemnations of PACE from eminent researchers in the field of ME/CFS. Here are just two of them:

Prof. Ronald Davis of Stanford University said: “I’m shocked that the Lancet published it…The PACE study has so many flaws and there are so many questions you’d want to ask about it that I don’t understand how it got through any kind of peer review.”

 Prof. Jonathan Edwards of University College London said: “It’s a mass of un-interpretability to me…All the issues with the trial are extremely worrying, making interpretation of the clinical significance of the findings more or less impossible.”

 PACE’s recommendations for the use of CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET) for ME/CFS have frequently been reported by the British media but the important work of Mr Tuller has been ignored, so grossly distorting the information which has been made available to the British public. It would be an invaluable service if your programme could help to redress this imbalance.

When asked about the recent PACE reanalysis on your programme, Prof Crawley replied as follows: Continue reading “Letter to Dr Phil Hammond”

Getting Airborne

Steve Hawkins, who often comments here at the blog and quietly does a lot of useful activist stuff behind the scenes, left the following comment/proposal on the OMEGA petition site (and added it here in response to the previous post). I thought it was worthy of a wider audience so I’m reposting it here to kick off today’s blog:

‘It seems unfortunate that there has to be a petition of this kind against what, in the right hands, and with careful preparation of protocols in advance, would undoubtedly be a gathering of very useful data; and I feel uncomfortable that this will discourage some of the very able researchers and research teams who have been brought into the MEGA group but had no part in earlier ill advised research proposals; but it seems that something of this sort will have to be done, to ensure a complete new start, and clean break with the discredited ‘science’ of biopsychosocial egotists.

‘I apologise to the, well-meaning, I’m sure, Prof. Holgate, and those others who I fear have had to be reticent in criticising poor research, because of the binding conditions that were attached to membership of the Research Collaborative, under the direction of the partisan ‘Science Media Centre’, but the time really has come to return to both freedom of speech and information in this research field, after the gambit of crying ‘harassment’ after any honest questioning, has been so clearly shown up for what it was, in the courts.

‘I would advise that a new steering group be set up for a large and inclusive, data gathering and biomic sequencing and typing study with the major emphasis on the severely affected, who are the most likely to yield clear differences worthy of more intensive study. By all means collect data from a quota of less severely disabled/sick patients as well, but only to the number necessary to provide a control match for each of the seriously ill study subjects. A similar number of healthy controls will also be needed.

‘Thus the size and expense of the study should stem from the maximum number of seriously ill participants for statistical certainty… (plus controls). If that turns out to be a very big cost Continue reading “Getting Airborne”

Out of the Blue

Well, I seem to have gone into PEM at the moment – due to too much blogging amongst other things. Fortunately I have a post for ME Awareness Month which I prepared earlier. In it, I have tried to describe how it can feel to be suddenly stricken down with this devastating condition. Please take a few minutes to read it, especially if you know very little about ME. It is not an easy illness to understand unless you have it yourself or are close to someone who does – and even then it can be bewildering. I have tried to open a small window on the experience of trying to adjust to this unwelcome visitor. (And if you’ve been wondering what PEM is, you’re about to find out…)

One day you start feeling ill. You don’t think very much about it at first. It’s just a bug and bugs go away, don’t they? But at the end of a week you’re not feeling any better. You wonder how long this is going to take. You’re getting a bit alarmed.

At the end of a fortnight, you’re positively worried. You have to phone work yet again to tell them you’re still not well. There’s a growing pressure to explain yourself but you’re just as baffled as everyone else. Your body’s supposed to repair itself, so why’s it not happening?

You also have to explain yourself to your family. They want to know when you’ll be well again. There are things to do that you can’t put on hold forever. Could you give them some idea of when you’ll be up to speed again? This illness of yours is getting inconvenient.

So you go to the doctor, hoping that he will know, but he doesn’t seem to have any more idea than you do. He gives you a sick note but even that seems grudging. Even he seems to think you ought to be fixing yourself by now. But isn’t that his job?

You try to start doing more – but the more you do, the worse you feel. You’re weak and in pain and something feels poisoned inside you. You’re starting to think that something is seriously wrong. Continue reading “Out of the Blue”

Time to be Heard

Six weeks on from the infamously unhelpful article by Sarah Knapton in the Daily Telegraph, the online version of the newspaper has published an article on ME by Dr Charles Shepherd of the ME Association with a view to correcting some of the misinformation. This was part of a deal which was struck by way of redress for the Telegraph falling so short of the truth on this occasion, as part of which they also published a ‘clarification’ of their assertion that ME isn’t really a chronic illness. As the clarification stated that the study they had reported actually said no such thing, it might have been more appropriate to call it  a ‘correction’ but I suppose you can’t expect a leading national newspaper to have such a precise grasp of the English language.

As for Dr Shepherd’s article, it doesn’t appear in the print edition, this in marked contrast to Knapton’s article which was linked from the front page. We have elderly relatives who read the original article but will only receive Shepherd’s piece because we’ll print it out and send them it. Many other Telegraph readers will sadly remain in ignorance.

This sort of imbalance is pretty much standard, of course, in situations like this, and Dr Shepherd and the ME Association are to be congratulated for at least getting the deal they did. It is worth, too, saying a word or two extra in praise of Charles Shepherd, who has been performing duties like this on our behalf for the best part of three decades now, plodding time and again to the barricades to call out the truth into the no man’s land of ignorance, doubt and incomprehension, then plodding patiently back again in the knowledge that he will probably have to do the same thing all over again in an another week’s time. And another. And another. The man is a hero. We are very fortunate to have him.

We are also lucky to have ME patients such as Tom Kindlon who have been plugging away with well reasoned comments for years, slowly exposing the fracture lines in the PACE Trial and counteracting other misconceptions. Not all of us are capable of such exhaustive feats of analysis, and yet there is a growing understanding that we all have a part to play in getting the truth out there. Continue reading “Time to be Heard”