Playing doctors and nurses: M.E. outbreaks most common in hospitals

Royal Free Hospital, London, scene of the controversial 1955 outbreak

“Disease is very old and nothing about it has changed. It is we who change as we learn to
recognise what was formerly imperceptible.” J.M. Charcot

This quote introduces a new study by a doctor, E.D. Acheson from New York who says that out of 14 outbreaks of M.E. in one study:


7 = staff in hospitals
2 = in semi-rural communities
2 = in large cities
2 = in small towns
1 = in an army barracks


You can see the study summarised helpfully here:


The Nice Guidelines Blogspot

and the whole paper here: 


http://www.meresearch.org.uk/information/keypubs/Acheson_AmJMed.pdf


You may well have heard, like me, of the M.E. outbreaks at the Royal Free Hospital in 1955 and 1956. This is sometimes cited as related to the physical illness Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. The Wiki still mutters with vague waffling about "mass hysteria"!

M.E. has been associated with such documented outbreaks since long before the World Health Organisation finally classified it as a serious neurological, auto-immune, multi-systemic disease.

So how is it, given its prevelance among health workers, that doctors and nurses are often among those most resistant to recognising the illness?
Running scared?
Playing: "If I can't see you, you can't see me?" with the disease that stalks their corridors?

It smacks of the same perverse spirit as the assertion that M.E. sufferers must not give blood for our own protection!


If more of these affected medical professionals actually recovered enough to feed their own painful experience and first-hand understanding back into the health services, what a different perception there would be!

Individuals like Dr Charles Shepherd, an M.E. patient himself, are shining examples of those doctors affected who fight so hard to raise awareness of M.E, wherever they can. We owe them such a debt of gratitude. But it doesn't seem to be the norm for doctors and nurses to have insight into M.E. even in 2011.

So much more is needed.


If you are still confused what M.E. actually entails, M.E. Action UK has a page here http://www.meactionuk.org.uk/definition.html
which makes it plain. M.E. (CFIDS or that woolly, patronising umbrella term CFS) is not just feeling a bit tired and depressed! (We wish!)

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