THE MENTAL HEALTH MOVEMENT : PERSECUTION OF PATIENTS ?

In 1988, a formerly healthy 12 year old boy named Ean Proctor from the Isle of Man had been suffering from ME since the autumn of 1986; his symptoms included total exhaustion, feeling extremely ill, abdominal pain, persistent nausea, drenching sweats, headaches, recurrent sore throat, heightened sensitivity to noise and light and loss of balance; he was also dragging his right leg. In 1987 his condition had rapidly deteriorated; he had gradually (not suddenly as may occur in hysterical disorders) lost his speech and was almost completely paralysed (which lasted for two years). He had been seen by Dr Morgan-Hughes, a senior consultant neurologist at the National Hospital in London, who had reaffirmed the diagnosis of ME and advised the parents that ME patients usually respond poorly to exercise until their muscle strength begins to improve; he also advised that drugs could make the situation worse.

Although he did not obtain his MRCPsych until 1986, during one visit by the Proctors to the National Hospital in 1988, Wessely (then a Senior Registrar in Psychiatry) entered the room and asked Ean’s parents if he could become involved in his case; desperate for any help, they readily agreed. Wessely soon informed them that children do not get ME, and unknown to them, on 3 June 1988 he wrote to the Principal Social Worker at Douglas, Isle of Man (Mrs Jean Manson) that “Ean presented with a history of an ability (sic) to use any muscle group which amounted to a paraplegia, together with elective mutatism (sic). I did not perform a physical examination but was told that there was no evidence of any physical pathology…I was in no doubt that the primary problem was psychiatric (and) that his apparent illness was out of all proportion to the original cause. I feel that Ean’s parents are very over involved in his care. I have considerable experience in the subject of ‘myalgic encephalomyelitis’ and am absolutely certain that it did not apply to Ean. I feel that Ean needs a long period of rehabilitation (which) will involve separation from his parents, providing an escape from his “ill” world. For this reason, I support the application made by your department for wardship”.

On 10 June 1988 Wessely provided another report on Ean Proctor for Messrs Simcocks & Co, Solicitors for the Child Care Department on the Isle of Man. Although Wessely had never once interviewed or examined the child, he wrote “I did not order any investigations….Ean cannot be suffering from any primary organic illness, be it myalgic encephalomyelitis or any other. Ean has a primary psychological illness causing him to become mute and immobile. Ean requires skilled rehabilitation to regain lost function. I therefore support the efforts being made to ensure Ean receives appropriate treatment”. Under his signature, Wessely wrote “Approved under Section 12, Mental Health Act 1983”.

In that same month (June 1988), without ever having spoken to his parents, social workers supported by psychiatrists and armed with a Court Order specially signed by a magistrate on a Sunday, removed the child under police presence from his distraught and disbelieving parents and placed him into “care” because psychiatrists believed his illness was psychological and was being maintained by an “over-protective mother”. Everything possible was done to censor communication between the child and his parents, who did not even know if their son knew why they were not allowed to visit him.

In this “care”, the sick child was forcibly thrown into a hospital swimming pool with no floating aids because psychiatrists wanted to prove that he could use his limbs and that he would be forced to do so to save himself from drowning. He could not save himself and sank to the bottom of the pool. The terrified child was also dragged out of the hospital ward and taken on a ghost train because psychiatrists were determined to prove that he could speak and they believed he would cry out in fear and panic and this would prove them right. Another part of this “care” included keeping the boy alone in a side-ward and leaving him intentionally unattended for over seven hours at a time with no means of communication because the call bell had been deliberately disconnected. The side-ward was next to the lavatories and the staff believed he would take himself to the lavatory when he was desperate enough. He was unable to do so and wet himself but was left for many hours at a time sitting in urine-soaked clothes in a wet chair. Another part of the “care” involved the child being raced in his wheelchair up and down corridors by a male nurse who would stop abruptly without warning, supposedly to make the boy hold on to the chair sides to prevent himself from being tipped out; he was unable to do so and was projected out of the wheelchair onto the floor, which on one occasion resulted in injury to his back. This was regarded as a huge joke by the staff.

In a further medical report dated 5th August 1988 for Messrs Simcocks, Wessely expressed a diametric opinion from that of Dr Morgan-Hughes, writing: “ A label does not matter so long as the correct treatment is instituted. It may assist the Court to point out that I am the co-author of several scientific papers concerning the topic of “ME”….I have considerable experience of both (it) and child and adult psychiatry (and) submit that mutism cannot occur (in ME). I disagree that active rehabilitation should wait until recovery has taken place, and submit that recovery will not occur until such rehabilitation has commenced……..it may help the Court to emphasise that…active management, which takes both a physical and psychological approach, is the most successful treatment available. It is now in everyone’s interests that rehabilitation proceeds as quickly as possible. I am sure that everyone, including Ean, is now anxious for a way out of this dilemma with dignity”.

Ean Proctor was kept in “care” and away from his parents for over five months.

Although this took place in 1988, such brutality is still happening in the UK: the continued barbaric “treatment” of sick children by certain psychiatrists who profess to specialise in ME was the subject of a Panorama programme transmitted on 8th November 1999 and was profoundly disturbing (a videotape recording is available). Nothing seems to have been learnt from the appalling case of Ean Proctor and there is no question that children with ME continue to be forcibly removed from their parents and home; this issue was raised by Dr Nigel Speight, a consultant paediatrician at the University Hospital of North Durham with 20 years experience of children with ME, who in April 1999 reported to the Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group on “CFS/ME” that the frequency of psychiatrists diagnosing the parents of children with ME as having Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy now amounted to an epidemic. Jane Colby, Executive Director of The Young ME Sufferers Trust (TYMES Trust) says “To have your sick child taken from you, to be suspected of damaging them yourself, just when they most need your care, is an appalling experience”.

Some ten years after her own nightmare experience, Mrs Proctor answered a knock at her door on the Isle of Man and was surprised to find herself confronted by a police officer who had been directed to question her by the Metropolitan Police. Although at the time she did not know it, another child with ME in southern England was being threatened with forcible removal from his home if his parents did not agree to his being admitted to a psychiatric hospital: in an effort to protect the child from inappropriate treatment and medical harm, his father had surreptitiously taken him abroad. When police officers broke into the house, it seems they found Mrs Proctor’s name and address and she was therefore suspected of assisting the boy’s parents in his disappearance and of harbouring him, which was untrue. Believing his son to be safe, the father returned to the UK where he was arrested and sentenced to two years imprisonment, a sentence he was happy to endure, thinking that his son was safe. However, the child’s mother was then targeted and threatened with imprisonment if the boy was not handed over to a particular psychiatrist at a Teaching Hospital. The physically sick child was forced to spend seven months under the “care” of this psychiatrist and was subjected to “active rehabilitation”, during which time his condition deteriorated considerably. He is now severely ill and terrified of health professionals.

The lengths to which these psychiatrists who have focused their careers on “eradicating ME” will go in order to obtain parental obedience, and the control they wield, is extremely disquieting.

Professor Wessely, though, seems to be curiously affected by elective amnesia over the compulsory removal of children with ME from their parents: his involvement with the wardship of Ean Proctor is incontrovertibly established, yet in a Channel 4 News programme on 26th August 1998 in which the case of Child X was being discussed, when asked by the presenter Sheena McDonald if there can ever be a case for the coercive approach in situations involving forcible removal of a child with ME from the parents, Wessely stated (verbatim quote) “You know very well I know nothing about these cases” and when Sheena McDonald asked “So you would agree that unless there is criminal abuse, there is never a case for a coercive approach to take children away from parents?”, Wessely replied (verbatim quote) “I think it’s so rare. I mean, it’s never happened to me”. Despite this denial on national television, there is unequivocal evidence that Wessely had been personally involved in Ean Proctor’s wardship and that he had advised the local authorities to take the action they did. (Copies of Wessely’s letters and reports and a videotape recording of the Channel 4 News item are available).

In 21st century medicine the Mental Health Movement is politically correct and immensely powerful: it is backed by the giant chemical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries which are now the funders and controllers of both undergraduate and post-graduate medical education. In the UK, these industries have known links to research funding bodies such as the Medical Research Council (MRC) and as a result, a vast amount of public money is presently being provided in an attempt to strengthen the currently weak psychiatrically-driven research evidence that behaviour-modifying “chronic illness management strategies” are effective.

As a consequence, the MRC has decided not to fund urgently needed biomedical research into complex and devastating disorders such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

Also relevant may be the Council of Europe Strasbourg Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, which confers rights including provision for drug and other medical trials on human beings which in certain circumstances could be carried out without the individual’s consent: this applies to three groups of people in particular:

(i) those who are deemed to be mentally ill
(ii) those for whom no other known treatment is effective
(iii) children

The Convention (not yet ratified by the UK) specifically states that in certain situations, “general interests” will take precedence over those of the individual.

Concurrently, in the UK, proposals for the Reform of the Mental Health Act were drawn so widely that they would give psychiatrists far greater powers to enforce compulsory psychiatric treatment upon both adults and children: proposals included provision for psychiatrists to be able to drug people (including children against the wishes of their parents) if they have “any disability or disorder of the mind or brain, whether permanent or temporary, which results in an impairment of mental functioning”.

Mental Health Movement advocates claim that disorders such as ME and CFS come into what they call the “medically unexplained symptoms” category (known as MUS or MUPS, which stands for “medically unexplained physical symptoms”) and that such disorders are psychogenic in origin; contrary to established principles of scientific investigation and discovery, these psychiatrists assert that “if all you look for are biomedical explanations, you’re missing the whole picture” and that if Government wants to solve the waiting-list dilemma (which it does, for political reasons), “they will have to channel serious money at this problem” by funding psychiatric management regimes ( http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx). The implications of the implementation of this policy are already spiralling out of control.

On 4th May 2000, a letter from the Office of the Minister of State at the Department of Health (signed by John Hutton) seemed not to rule out the re-classification of ME/CFS as a “mental” disorder, stating it was unlikely that the proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act would affect such patients (quote) “even if (ME/CFS) were reclassified as a mental rather than a physical disorder”.

In October 1999 Dr Michael Sharpe (a psychiatrist and prominent member of the Wessely School) gave a lecture at the University of Strathclyde at which he said: “Purchasers and health care providers with hard-pressed budgets are understandably reluctant to spend money on patients who are not going to die and for whom there is controversy about the ‘reality’ of their condition (and who) are undeserving of treatment”.

Are those with other classified neurological disorders also “undeserving of treatment”?

Infiltration of institutions by vested interest groups was the subject of an article by George Monbiot published on 9th December 2003 in the Guardian (Invasion of the Entryists), from which the following extracts are taken and to whom acknowledgement is made:

“One of the strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the (UK) Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further to the extremities of the pro-corporate right. Its tactics (involve) entering organisations and taking them over. Research published for the first time today suggests that members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment. The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter; it immediately set out to destroy competing oppositional movements. In 1988 it set up a magazine called Living Marxism (known as) LM. By this time it had moved to the far right and was led by the academic Frank Furedi who started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and who contacted the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers ‘about complex scientific issues’. In the late 1990s the group started infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. In 2000, LM was sued by ITN after falsely claiming that (its) news journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked.

“All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of researcher Jonathan Matthews, what seems to be a new front in this group’s campaign has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.

“Its participants (work) for the PR firm Regester Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis, Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners.

“(One of its participants) is Fiona Fox, who is the director of the Science Media Centre (which) is funded, amongst others, by the pharmaceutical companies Astra Zeneca, Dupont and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science Media Centre to promote the views of industry and to launch fierce attacks against those who question them.

“Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own sake, or one following a political design? The scientific establishment appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network. Far from rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this group’s repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it”.

Of significance to the ME community is the fact that Spiked’s health writer is Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, well-known for presenting and promoting the views of Professor Simon Wessely and for his perverse and immoderate attacks on those with ME. One such article can be found at  http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D3B6.htm (SPIKED: Health: 17th January 2002: “ME: the making of a new disease”). Referring to the then newly published Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group report on CFS/ME (see text), Fitzpatrick roundly derided the CMO, Professor Liam Donaldson: “The CFS/ME compromise reflects a surrender of medical authority to irrationality. The scale of this capitulation is apparent when Professor Donaldson claims that CFS/ME should be classified together with conditions such as multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease. The effectiveness of the ME lobby reflects its middle-class base.”

Also of significance is the fact that in its NOTES FOR EDITORS, Spiked states that Professor Simon Wessely is available for comment or interview and can be contacted through Sandy Starr at Spiked (0207-269-9234).

Of relevance to the ME community is that fact that Lord (David) Sainsbury (Science Minister –see text) is a keen supporter of the Science Media Centre. It is Lord Sainsbury’s Linbury Trust that since 1991 has financially supported studies of chronic fatigue by psychiatrists of the Wessely School.

Information on the GMWATCH website (www.gmwatch.org) is also important to the ME community. By 2003, Lord Sainsbury had donated over £11 million to the Labour Party. Mark Seddon, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, told the BBC “In any other country, I think a government minister donating such vast amounts of money and effectively buying a political party would be seen for what it is, a form of corruption of the political process”.

For some, the choice of an unelected biotech investor and food industrialist to be Science Minister is more than emblematic of the UK’s corporate-science culture.

In a recent Financial Times article, Lord Sainsbury cites the following statistics: British universities spun off 199 companies in 2000, up from an annual average of 67 in the previous five years. The UK’s ratio of companies to research spending is now more than six times higher than the US. “It’s a dazzling record”, Lord Sainsbury is quoted as saying.

Not everyone shares Sainsbury’s enthusiasm. Professor Stephen Rose of the Open University Biology Department is among those who have commented critically on this emerging corporate science culture: “The whole climate of what might be open and independent scientific research has disappeared”.

A major Report from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution under the Chairmanship of Sir Tom Blundell FRS, FMedSci was released in June 2003 (Chemicals in Products; pp 291, pub: The Stationery Office). It pointed out that thousands of chemicals are being used every day without proper safety tests. Only 40 of the 30,000 chemicals in large-scale use have been tested fully. It would take 50 years to check all commercial chemicals. Blundell said on the record that “Given our understanding of the way chemicals interact with the environment, you could say we are running a gigantic experiment with humans and all other living things as the subject”.

The World Wildlife Fund is on record as pointing out that “The chemical industry is contaminating the nation and the Government is rolling over and allowing it to continue” (Independent:25.11.03: Steve Connor).

It is this prevailing use of so many chemicals that is thought to be chronically stimulating the immune system, dysfunction of which (non-psychiatrist) world experts have demonstrated lies at the heart of ME/CFS.

If influential doctors can succeed in portraying ME as non-existent and CFS as psychiatric in origin, then the chemical companies and governments who granted them product licences would not be at risk of being accountable should there turn out to be a provable link with the synergistic effects of so many chemicals, daily exposure to which is now impossible to avoid due to the huge increase in chemical usage.

Accountability becomes even more remote if all research which demonstrates a link between chemicals and the present upsurge in chemically-induced ME is blocked from publication, trivialised, ignored or discredited, as is certainly the case with ME.

Those informed and brave enough to voice their legitimate concerns and who try to resist what they know to be inappropriate strategies are treated as “enemies of the State”: they are berated, dismissed, ridiculed, threatened with injunctions, covertly videoed, harassed, subjected to phone taps, bullied, attacked on the Internet and denigrated; their universities are contacted with countless insistent demands for disciplinary proceedings; NHS Consultants are “warned off”; non-psychiatric ME clinics are closed virtually overnight; families are taken before the Courts and children are forcibly removed from their loving parents and placed into psychiatric “care” by those charged with healing the sick.

Wessely School psychiatrists have spent years defending the chemical industry. Two important examples are provided:


The Camelford Drinking Water Contamination

In July 1988 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate were accidentally pumped into the drinking water supplies of the small town of Camelford in Cornwall. As a result, residents and visitors immediately suffered distressing symptoms; seven people died, 25,000 suffered serious health effects and 40,000 animals were affected. An article by Bernard Dixon in the BMJ on 5th August 1995, based on the work of psychiatrists Anthony David and Simon Wessely, stated that “mass hysteria” was largely responsible for the furore. David and Wessely had found that “anxiety” and “heightened perception of normal bodily sensations” were the cause of the long-term symptoms and that “sensational reporting” by the media had been a significant factor. It was not until 1999 that Paul Altmann from Oxford (commissioned by lawyers acting on behalf of the Camelford plaintiffs and funded by Legal Aid, not through the Department of Health) effectively rebutted the Wessely School view that anxiety was to blame and showed conclusively that Camelford residents had objective evidence of considerable organic brain damage which was compatible with the known effects of exposure to aluminium. Altmann demonstrated that many of those originally affected still had symptoms eleven years later.


The organophosphate (sheep dip) issue

In November 1998 the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Psychiatrists produced a Report (Organophosphate sheep dip: clinical aspects of long-term low-dose exposure / CR67); two of the authors were Professor Anthony David and Professor PK Thomas. This was the same Anthony David who co-authors with Wessely on ME/CFS and whose views on ME/CFS echo those of Wessely himself. It was Professor Thomas who, with Wessely, published a chapter on ME in a major textbook of clinical neurology which stated “A number of patients diagnosed as having myalgic encephalomyelitis were examined. In many of them, the usual findings of simulated weakness were present. Over-espousal of new illnesses may legitimise maladaptive behaviour” (The chronic fatigue syndrome ---myalgic encephalomyelitis or postviral fatigue. Wessely S, Thomas PK. In: Recent Advances in Clinical Neurology No. 6. ed: C Kennard: Churchill Livingstone 1990:85-132). Unsurprisingly, the Report concluded that “possible explanations for the symptoms are naturally occurring illnesses, for example, severe anxiety and depression which have been attributed by the sufferers to OP exposure”. The Report recommends “a treatment trial of a cognitive behavioural approach (and) a randomised controlled trial of antidepressants”.

Below is a full list of contents for the document, which can be read at:

 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MEND-UK/files/Mental%20Health%202.doc



CONTENTS


Executive Summary

Brief Introduction

The Mental Health Movement

What is the problem?

What is the “Wessely School”?

The Opinion of a Queen’s Counsel

Are psychiatrists cruel?

Two illustrations of the implementation of Wessely School policy
The case of Ean Proctor
The case of Child X

The formal International Classification of ME by the World Health Organisation

Current Government policy concerning ME

What is ME and is it the same as CFS?

What is CFS?

Are both camps looking at the same disorder?

Some published views of the Wessely School on ME

Illustrations of Wessely’s influence over the national perception of ME
The UK Guide to Mental Health in Primary Care
The NHS Information Authority (NHSIA)
The House of Commons Library
The Official Secrets Act
The Media
The Medical Trade Journals
Disgraceful treatment of patients
A medical insurance company’s perception of ME



Illustrations of Wessely’s influence over the international perception of ME
The Australasian Report on CFS (2002)
A Canadian medico-legal reference book (2003)

Tactics of denial employed by Wessely School psychiatrists
Denial of the known and available evidence
Tactics of denial used in relation to ME/CFS

The Joint Royal Colleges’ Report on CFS (1996)
Comparisons with a contemporaneous American Report

The Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group Report on CFS/ME (2002)
Undeclared competing interests
The disability insurance industry
The published views of Professor Anthony Pinching
The York Systematic Review of the literature

The Medical Research Council Research Advisory Group on CFS/ME

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Graded Exercise

Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology on MRC

A chemical link?

Conclusions

Suggested Further Reading

Appendix I ---Quotations from the published works of Simon Wessely on ME/CFS

Appendix II –Quotations from the published works of Michael Sharpe on ME/CFS

The best cure for so called '20th century psychiatric problems's....

ME, CFS etc, is a patch of land, a hoe and some hard work tilling the soil.

Apathetic, miserable 'OH I'm so hard done by' attitudes...

You didnt have ME suffers 40 years ago when people had to work for a living and didnt sit about moping about how boring and unfufilling their lives are.

Look at the people who claim to have ME, a disproportionate level are societal freaks such as Fat Goth Birds and Effeminate Men.

I think ME should be categorised as an attention deficit disorder linked to a bi polar depressive state disorder.

I'm so glad it that rattled you enough for you to show your contempt. Tell me was it Hoopers' document, or my addition (picture) that upset you most ?

By the way:

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) has been documented in the medical literature from 1934. (1) The Wallis description of ME (not Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, known as CFS - see below) was in 1957. (2) Sir Donald Acheson's (a former UK Chief Medical Officer) major review of ME was in 1959. (3) In 1962, the distinguished neurologist Lord Brain included it in the standard textbook of neurology. (4) ME has been formally classified by the World Health Organisation as a neurological disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) since 1969 (ICD-8: Vol I: code 323, page 158; Vol II (Code Index) page 173).........

 http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/What_Is_ME_What_Is_CFS.htm#History

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Evidence of abnormalities in ME

Despite beliefs and assertions to the contrary, in ME there is evidence of inflammation of the central nervous system (CNS); that is what helps to differentiate ME from other forms of CFS. There are many references in the medical literature to inflammation of the CNS in ME and in ICD-CFS (37),(38),(39),(40),(41),(42) but such CNS inflammation is not found in all variants of CFS. It is incorrect to deny the existence of CNS inflammation in ME / ICD-CFS. In some cases of ME, as in multiple sclerosis, there is evidence of oligoclonal bands in the cerebrospinal fluid. (43),(44)

It is accepted by the most experienced ME clinicians that some degree of encephalitis has occurred both in patients with ME and in those with post-polio syndrome: the areas chiefly affected include the upper spinal motor and sensory nerve roots and the spinal nerve networks traversing the adjacent brain stem (which is always damaged). (45) In nearly every patient there are signs of disease of the central nervous system. (46) Recent research continues to support neurological involvement. (47),(48),(49),(50),(51),(52),(53)........

 http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/What_Is_ME_What_Is_CFS.htm#Evidence

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The Opinion of an eminent Queen's Counsel has been obtained

A leading QC and member of the House of Lords was asked for an Opinion on the Wessely School approach to ME: that Opinion is unequivocal; it states: "On the document you have sent me there is an overwhelming case for the setting up of an immediate independent investigation as to whether the nature, cause and treatment of ME as considered by the Wessely School is acceptable or consistent with good and safe medical practice. There is substantial doubt as to whether such could be the case. A formal request should be made to set up an enquiry. It is essential that a reputable firm of solicitors should be instructed".

Alison Hunter on gardening:

Dr Hans Leibericht wrote: "The best cure for so called '20th century psychiatric problems's.... ME, CFS etc, is a patch of land, a hoe and some hard work tilling the soil.


"The fatigue is not everyday tiredness, experienced after an energetic day's gardening. It is an exhaustion of body and mind so profound that it becomes a concerted effort to think, walk and sometimes even move, sit, eat or breathe."
- Alison Hunter, from Forget M.E. Not, an article written in September 1993.

Alison died in 1996, aged 19, from complications arising from ME/CFS which included seizures, paralysis, gastrointestinal paresis and overwhelming infection resembling Behcets Disease.


Alison courageously fought ME/CFS for ten years...

 http://www.ahmf.org/about.html


"Alison was like someone going through a concentration camp - suffering terrible physical distress compounded by insults and inhumanity." -

(Sydney Morning Herald, Weekend Edition May 4–5 News Review 37 - Medical writer Julie Robotham)

 http://www.ahmf.org/smh040502.html


"The cold, hard deliberateness with which the extensive scientific evidence of the physical nature of ME/CFS is routinely dismissed or ignored, goes beyond abuse. It speaks of an agenda that is not concerned with patient welfare."

 http://www.ahmf.org/01videoreview.html