Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Graded Exercise, and what ME patients think…

Source: ME Association News:
Wednesday, 30 July 2008

The latest issue of the ME Association’s quarterly magazine, ME Essential, is landing on members’ doormats this week with an extra heavy thump.

This is because it contains a 24-page printed version of the MEA’s online questionnaire – which is rapidly turning into the biggest-ever survey into what illness management measures work best for people with ME/CFS, those that don’t and the ones that are less successful.

“Online, the survey has been started by 2,400 people so far and it’s got another month to run”, said the ME Association.

“It’s already yielding some fascinating information – including the most up-to-date picture anywhere of what sufferers really think about officially-approved but controversial approaches like Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Graded Exercise.”

The ME Association said: “Our aim is to produce a fully-informed report on illness management measures which work in the best interests of people with ME/CFS and their carers, and get these views across to the medical establishment, with recommendations for action.”

The main magazine opens with a look at a stunning advertising campaign which blazed a trail for the first-ever ME Awareness Week in Malta – a simple approach, carried out with style and panache, which got islanders and the rest of the ME world looking.

Incapacity Benefit will be replaced by the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA)

ME Association News:

“ME Association writes to DWP about Employment and Support Allowance:
Friday, July 25

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Dear Mr Purnell,

Having been closely involved in the Department of Work and Pensions consultation process regarding new medical guidance on ME/CFS for the purpose of Disability Living Allowance and Carer’s Allowance application assessments, The ME Association is obviously very interested in the process for replacing Incapacity Benefit with the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

Before commenting on the green paper, which …………..”

RCGP agrees to stop classifying CFS as a mental health disorder

Wednesday, 16 July 2008

ME Association News:

“The ME Association is pleased to announce that we have been informed by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) that they will now remove their classification of CFS as a mental health disorder.

This is an important precedent in that it will now be very difficult for anyone in a position of authority to claim that CFS (or ME or CFS) can be classified or officially listed as a mental health disorder.

Thanks to both the Countess of Mar for securing time in the House of Lords for questions on ME/CFS to Lord Darzi in June and to Baroness Howe for asking about the RCGP classification……….”

ME News, no PSYCHO babble …

Simon Wessely I Know it All was created to provide a platform against nonsense in the medical profession in general, and in ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) in particular. However, it was closed down as no one in this world can be called:

1. Simon
2. Simon Wessely or
3. Wessely

So everybody with any of those names, GET a DEED POLL and change your name straight away because there is only one person who can have that name apparently !!!

I have mailed the UEFA as Spain won EURO 2008 with a dominating midfield player called SENNA and as we all know, that is someone else, just ask Mr Ron Dennis from McLaren.

So this BLOG is now called:
Proper ME News, No PSYCHO Babble

But otherwise things haven’t changed, I am still bedridden 24/7, due to ME, and please remember,
I still KNOW it ALL.

Have a NICE day.

Simon Wessely, SL SWCIE ME

(Senior Lecturer at the Simon Wessely Couch Institute of Excellence, ME)

ME may soon be diagnosed by blood test

The promising ME research, about which you report (Latest research shows ME may be in the genes, The Herald, May 6) will be aired at a conference this week. Its focus is on the physical cause of this neurological illness (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), for which there is already an abundance of evidence.

Dr Jonathan Kerr has good reason to believe that a diagnostic test – perhaps a simple blood test – which may suggest appropriate treatment, is only a matter of time.

Last week, a Royal Society of Medicine conference, to which only a selected audience of doctors were invited, focused on fatigue and the psychiatric origins of ME for which there is none.

There is no diagnostic test in sight and the only recommendations are two coping, or management, strategies, one of which, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) has no lasting benefit, without relapse, for people with ME and the other, Graded Exercise Treatment (GET), which makes some patients irrecoverably worse.

ME sufferers are appalled and frustrated, that the psychiatric approach has had £8.5m to establish a network of clinics, which requires millions more each year to maintain, while not a penny piece of public money has been spent on biomedical research and work like Dr Kerr’s has to rely on charity.

By: Dr John H Greensmith, ME Free For All. org, 36a North Street, Downend, Bristol.

Dear All .. I am back or should I say, The Empire strikes back …

If GET cures you, you had a problem but it either wasn’t ME or you had a spontaneous recovery…….

Just read Dr Ramsay’s book, available for a FIVER…………

And as for Professor Wessely and ME patients, has he ever seen one just ask MARGARET WILLIAMS ………