The following was written by an M.D. who contracted CFS.
Skeptical of Skeptics
by Thomas L. English, M.D. appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association February 27, 1991
http://njcfsa.org/INSPIR.html#skeptic
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/265/8/964.extract
Extract
'I have talked with scores of fellow patients who went to our profession for help, but who came away humiliated, angry, and afraid. Their bodies told them they were physically ill, but the psycho speculation of their physicians was only frightening and infuriating -- not reassuring.
It told them their doctors had little understanding of the real problem.
Many patients had depleted themselves financially, dragging in vain through expensive series of tests and consultants as their lives crumbled around them.
They had lost careers, homes, families, in addition to the loss of stamina and cognitive skills.
There is nothing that you hold dear that this illness cannot take from you. Nothing.
Are we to believe that just because symptoms are strange and unfamiliar they cannot be real?
Are we to assume that our laboratory tests are capable of screening for new diseases as well as old?
Distrust of new ideas is as old as humankind; so are the harmful consequences of that distrust.
The doctrines of Lister and Semmelweis were not generally accepted for more than 50 years.
I shudder to think of the death and misery caused by the skeptics during that half-century.'
Yes this was written twenty years ago and what has changed?
Also it is twenty years ago since Joe Burrascano said in his infamous Senate testimony that-
a core group of university-based Lyme disease researchers and physicians "act unscientifically and unethically," adhering to outdated views and attempting to discredit differing opinions. "They behave this way for reasons of personal or professional gain, and are involved in obvious conflicts of interest."
See his video presentation part two here
Burrascano is not alone in his views.
About four years ago, Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general for Connecticut, launched an antitrust investigation into the guidelines used by the Infectious Diseases Society of America for the treatment of Lyme disease.
The guidelines were adopted in 2006. According to Blumenthal's office, the investigation found, among other things:
The society failed to review panelists who created the guidelines for conflicts of interest. (Some of the panelists were later found to have conflicts.)
The panels in 2000 and 2006 refused to accept information regarding the existence of chronic Lyme disease.
The society blocked panel appointment of scientists and physicians with divergent views on chronic Lyme.
Blumenthal's investigation resulted in the society agreeing to reassess its treatment guidelines.”
The more one delves into available research on ME/CFS and Lyme Disease the more one realises that our Health Authorities are deliberately turning a blind eye to the patients plight and denying the science that is available thus holding up further investigations into these illnesses.
Tuskegee x 10000 as Ken Leigner so aptly put it in his letter to the Institute of Medicine here
We want recognition now not in another twenty years, support research centres such as these and we will do it without our Health Authorities permission.
Whittemore Peterson Institute here who are working on ME/CFS and associations with XMRV retrovirus.
and
Tyme for Lyme who work with Columbia University on Tick borne illnesses and Lyme Disease
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