"Could new techniques ease living with ME?"
Here's a link to said article:
Miriam Stoppard's "advice" in "The Daily Mirror"
Dr Stoppard is well known for her previous statements that ME (lumped here under the CFS brolly with no apparent insight gained from the last few decades of medical research!) is bunk.
She graciously (yes, I'm doing irony!) deigns not to make the same sweeping statement again. Not because she has learned from the latest research, but rather, because she is still smarting from the "bitter experience" of upsetting people suffering with ME through insensitivity and ignorance last time she plunged into print about it.
Believe us, the "bitter experience" of living with ME, not to mention the "bitter experience" of having well-meaning souls snipping out similar nay-saying misleading articles and press cuttings like this to pass on to ME sufferers to "give us hope", bears no comparison to the temporary fit of pique caused by you having your highly paid opinion shown up as risible and dangerous, Dr S!
For your information, there is nothing "new" by any stretch of the imagination in the notion that CBT and GET can help (or cripplingly hinder) the progress and wellbeing of people with various forms of ME-related illnesses. Both forms of talking therapy/graded exercise have been with us for many years, beginning in those dark ages when ME was believed to be no more than a form of depression with added idleness thrown in for good measure (when we had the luxury to wallow in our so-called "lifestyle choice" AKA "Yuppie Flu").
In the mildest forms of post-viral fatigue, indeed, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and GET (Graded Exercise Therapy) will soon, inevitably, make everything hunky dory as the body gets over its temporary viral setback. But ME shows every sign of being something much more disabling and persistent for a percentage of sufferers.
For the rest of us, in fact, in clinical trials, it has been proven time and time again not to be helpful at all, but often quite the reverse. Those who were too sick to show improvement, or who were made worse by CBT and GET, have been systematically airbrushed from the medical world's horizon.
The NICE guidelines themselves have been challenged robustly for deliberately and cynically giving weight to the idea that the cheap and potentially ineffective CBT and GET are the only way to go. It saves on funding proper rigorous research, in any case.
Dr Stoppard has read her NICE guidelines, at least. Haven't we all, doctors and ME patients alike? But the PACE trials (to which I assume she is referring in this article?) did not, as stated categorically in her article, prove that these generalised techniques and therapies were a newfound lifeline to the "walking well". Cos we ain't always walking, and we're very far from well!
The article, to be fair, does admit in the penultimate paragraph that CBT/GET should be used alongside other approaches such as:
"dividing the day into sessions of rest and work; setting realistic goals; healthy eating; trying to reduce stress and joining a support group".
These are all elements of "pacing" well known and vital to merely functioning day to day for many of us with ME.
I'll "try to reduce stress" right now, by putting the article to one side and having a lie down to recover from a few sessions of angry, muddled typing and several edits through the day!
Giving a whole new dimension to the concept of patronising, the article ends with the breezy:
"So people with CFS" [the much vaguer term used here instead of ME in the headline!] "may want to try CBT and graded exercise. It could change their lives".
We're so over breezy and patronising, Miriam. Thanks for asking.
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