Dear Dr. Wessely

An open letter to Dr. Simon Wessely,

My my, such a to-do this week. Over precisely what? If you have received actual death threats, for heaven's sake take them to the police, now. Or are you just exagerrating your lack of popularity in the patient community?

If you really have received threats (and if so, that's what the law is for), then here is my response to you:

1. There are an estimated 250,000 patients in the UK suffering from M.E. Statistically speaking, it's probable that some within that large community might be personally unbalanced. It's irresponsible to use those few as an excuse to mistreat the rest. How have you mistreated them? In this particular case, by trying to scare off researchers and clinicians who might seek to help these people, many of whom are invalids.  You also blow a smoke screen so the press doesn't notice there's professional and sober criticism of your pet theories and research.
     This is irresponsible for a medical professional, and irresponsible for all those media outlets to give you so much space with which to condemn 250,000 sick people. Shame on you, and shame on them.

2. The researchers who I know who have left the field did so because of threats from their bosses and ridicule from colleagues, not patients, plus a lack of funding for biomedical research. Your outcries might perform the same function. Now why would you want that?

3. Things got pretty hot in the breast cancr community when they were debating full mastectomy v. simple lump removal, but nobody suggested stopping research into breast cancer.

4. If email had been available in the mid-1980s, does anyone believe the desperately sick and ignored AIDS community would never have sent insulting emails? To someone who insisted they were somaticizing?

5. How convenient that the press plasters Simon's paranoia all over the place, but the stories printed about ME/CFS in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal in the past year never got a peep in the British press - now why is that? Do you believe Americans are more polite? Not likely, is it? Do you think it might have something to do with the SMC, which you helped found? Has the British press really sunk this low?

There were lots of stories involving M.E. and CFS that could have been covered by the British press this past week. A committee has come up with a new definition of M.E., based on biomarkers and biological evidence, soon to be published in the Journal of Internal Medicine. That's certainly worthy of coverage. New biomarkers have come out of the New Jersey School of Medicine and Dentistry. But the British press doesn't cover the evidence that M.E. and CFS (Fukuda 1994) or ME/CFS (Canada 2003) are not caused by somaticizing (the physical expression of emotion).

In 1999, Harvard University medical professor Anthony Komaroff declared in the Journal of American Medicine that with thousands of refereed journal articles into biomedical symptoms, correlations, tests, and possible causes of CFS (Fukuda 1994), it's time to put an end to the psychiatric explanation of the disorder. He has not changed his position (except to note there are now thousands more). How long will it take for that information to reach British shores? Twelve years of silence is a very long time.

When will responsible scientists, journalists, and representatives of the government finally put an end to the monopoly of information in the UK by psychiatrists, with regards to both CFS and M.E.? WHO has coded M.E. under neurology, not psychiatry, since 1969. Why is all the information on this disease printed in the UK tilted towards psychiatry? It certainly hasn't helped the patients, who remain sick (with an estimated 65,000 housebound or bedridden). People have died from this disease, and at some point in its course it is apparently contagious - why keep shoving it under the rug?

Gosh, do you think it has anything to do with the monetary inconvenience it would pose for insurance companies and penurious governments if this disease were taken seriously - if the biomedical research was portrayed honestly?

I fear George Orwell's dystopia has arrived - 27 years late.