Wellcome Book Prize 2016 - ignorance rewarding ignorance

*Updating this post: fantastic news, first ME biobank in Europe is officially opening its doors to external researchers on May 12 at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. More info here.

I resent using any more energy - it truly takes its toll - on the daft neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan, but the travesty of her winning the Wellcome Book Prize is too important to ignore. I've been trying to correct her harmful nonsense about ME since she won the prize last week, on Twitter. She herself blocks everyone who challenges her, including the mother of severely ill patient Whitney Dafoe whose father, Stanford scientist Ron Davis, is valiantly trying to complete the ME jigsaw.

In serious scientific circles, there is no longer any doubt that myalgic encephalomyeltis/chronic fatigue syndrome (I hate that name, but it is used in research) is  a serious, complex physical illness - though poorly understood, it is NOT psychiatric or psychological. However, that didn't stop O'Sullivan from including ME in a chapter of her 2015 book, It's All in Your Head, a study of psychosomatic illness - or rather a series of anecdotes about patients she has seen. She has published before on carpal tunnel syndrome and non-epileptic seizures (I have not been able to find any papers on ME, unsurprisingly).  Whatever the merits of the other chapters, O'Sullivan has no expertise whatsoever in ME, but that didn't stop the judges from being seduced by her magnificent nonsense (worth noting I think that no one in the research world has heard of Suzanne O'Sullivan, but she is elevated to an ME 'authority' just by having this book published).

Her ME chapter is, of course, wholly uninformed and manipulative, unoriginal in its prejudice and bias. I reviewed the book last year on Goodreads.  Her Rachel chapter is revealing only in what it omits. It's fairly clear to anyone who is informed about ME -  as patient, carer or true specialist - that O'Sullivan is havering (good Scottish word). She's not going to rock the science, of course, that is progressing nicely - but unfortunately she is persuading new gullible readers that ME is an unconscious switch in our heads that flicks on and mimics serious illness. You couldn't fucking make it up that in 2016 this got the Wellcome Book Prize. The judges - I imagine intelligent and decent people - though only one seems to work in medicine/science - simply rewarded ignorance with ignorance.

What is *most* galling is the fawning, ignorant media, who have indulged her all week, themselves almost wilfully ignorant of biomedical research. They assume a mantle of authority. And readers and reviewers of O'Sullivan too become overnight experts in a neuroimmune illness they know nothing of.

I was told earlier by an obnoxious book reviewer (he was making quips about his own hypochondria and full of praise for her book, saying he'd be 'thrilled' to know he didn't have a serious neurological disorder, and wondering why do patients have  a problem with a likely psychological diagnosis) that the ME chapter is *only* 20 pages and that he had no interest in debating further. I told him I've been ill for 33 years, diagnosed by a consultant neurologist, and 250, 000 in UK have ME, so 20 pages is not just 20 pages; and I suggested perhaps it's best not to tweet about a book if you have no interest in discussing the issues. For this, he blocked me. My voice silenced just like that. Basically told to dry my eyes, we have nothing to complain about. A quarter of a million lives already severely diminished, further harmed by O'Sullivan's nonsense. Yes, book bloggers know best. What a luxury to be able to dismiss those 20 pages! He blocked others too who tried to educate him.

Interestingly, no one in the UK media has yet asked Suzanne O'Sullivan about the toxic PACE trial - which has just been in court over failure to share its data (someone on Amazon has suggested there might be a significance that one of the judges works for QMUL, but surely not, that is just too depressing to contemplate that judges would not be independent. Though the way this illness has been relentlessly politicised since the nineties truly stinks. Personally, I don't believe there was any 'fix', just lazy, old prejudices about ME being confirmed). O'Sullivan predictably praises GET/CBT in her book - cannily, without actually naming PACE - as the most effective treatment, with no reference at all to the harms of graded exercise. Just as she praises Simon Wessely, without naming him. His name, of course,  now carries too much baggage. Her claim that he is 'the person in the UK who has taken this illness the most seriously' is, I'd confidently say, a giant whopper (there are a few in the chapter). She conveniently omits the 1980s' UK specialists: Melvin Ramsay, Peter Behan, Betty Dowsett, John Richardson, and Nigel Speight (my illness was taken very seriously in 1984 by Professor Behan, then Doctor).

And, of course, she disingenuously conflates ME and 'chronic fatigue', just like those psychiatrists she emulates. O'Sullivan - and those like her - seek to control a dying narrative. She has been silencing those who politely challenge her. I was blocked when I simply asked her this. She lives in a little bubble on Twitter, which only lets praise in. Patients with ME have no right of reply. Is this not quite strange for a scientist? The prize is about stimulating scientific debate, one wonders what she is so afraid of. The truth, perhaps?

It has been gruelling having this illness for 33 years, and indescribably exhausting trying to educate others, yet still we are facing this prejudice and nonsense from a small, self-congratulatory club in the UK (USA are miles ahead, although we do have fantastic initiatives here like Invest in ME annual conferences). As someone else said on Twitter, how much evidence do these people need, what will it take? What do they all gain from acting like petulant children, fingers in ears?

I cried when I read that O'Sullivan had won the Wellcome Prize. Could this really be the most deserving book on the shortlist? - it is not even well written, the somewhat toneless chapters all blur into one (not to mention that the made-up patient name 'Camilla' is alienating, but that is a trivial point).  I have now run out of words, trying to educate the seemingly ineducable, but I do still have my precious novel. It remains my weapon. Two of these books tells the truth about Ramsay-ME, one recycles nonsense:

More updates:  *For ME Awareness Day (12 May) Prof Julia Newton on abnormalities found in ME. 

** More on PACE trial shenanigans.

*** Updates on mitochondrial research.

The daft neurologist (cont'd) ...

My book being published in 2008 has been one of the happiest times in my life - though the process was certainly not without its trials (and I developed very frightening uveitis afterwards - the whole fiasco took its toll) - and on the launch night I was in heaven. The room was packed, copies of my novel piled up beside me, my nephews - then just three and six - were sitting in the audience and walked up to the front with roses during the reading. That was the only actual launch event I did, I can't possibly run around the country/world doing writerly things and that breaks my heart.

Still.

 *

You would think/hope that thirty years after my diagnosis of ME - abnormal muscle biopsy, abnormal EMG, abnormal blood tests etc etc etc - all would be fine and dandy, we would be waiting patiently and quietly for the elusive biomarker, as dedicated researchers worked hard to help us find a cause and cure. No chance. 

The (ever more desperate) psychiatric lobby is always hiding behind you, waiting to jump out and squeeze the very soul out of you. This past fortnight we have been treated to a work called 'It's all in your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness' by a daft neurologist called Suzanne O'Sullivan, who apparently googled ME and then wrote her ridiculous chapter on ME/CFS and false illness beliefs. Her book sits on the table in the same Waterstones I had my launch. It is very tempting to place copies of The State of Me, offer a 2-for-1, prevent readers being  duped. And Suzanne is of course, doing the whole literary trail, book festivals galore. She seems wholly unperturbed about spreading medical misinformation.

This Bookseller article referred to her book as 'groundbreaking and controversial'.

I can confirm however that it is certainly not groundbreaking, more a dreary recycling of the biopsychosocial narrative because as I already reviewed here on Goodreads, it includes a case study 'Rachel', a young woman with 'ME/CFS' who 'fails' to manage her fatigue and doesn't get better. Naughty Rachel. She refuses psychiatric treatment (Good for you, Rachel). The chapter is manipulative and incoherent. Vacuous too. 

This is 2015, let's just remind ourselves. Yet Suzanne has not managed to keep up with the science in spite  of having it all at her fingertips. If Suzanne were not so dangerous, she would be a hoot, but this is, frankly, indefensible:

 'I will not be obtuse. I believe that psychological factors and behavioural issues, if they are not the entire cause, at the very least contribute in a significant way to prolonging the disability that occurs in chronic fatigue syndrome. Do I know that for sure? No, nobody does...'

'...So is it a somatisation disorder? ME/CFS is an illness in its own right that has not traditionally been referred to as a somatisation disorder, but that is not to say that it does not share common ground with psychosomatic disorders. It manifests as multiple medically unexplained symptoms. Sufferers of both disorders carry similar behaviours and illness beliefs and neither leads to evidence of organic disease however long you wait.'

 'There is certainly evidence that ME/CFS can be precipitated by exposure to an infecting agent (no shit, Sherlock!) but once the infection has cleared, there is no way of explaining how the syndrome of chronic fatigue develops, except perhaps to consider the psychological vulnerability of those affected and their behavioural response to the illness.'

The icing on the cake (this part is also in my Goodreads review but is worth repeating for those of us who actually have an understanding of the stinking politics around this illness):

'In my early years training in neurology I encountered many patients with CFS, but more recently neurologists have distanced themselves from this disorder and patients are more likely to seek help from immunologists or endocrinologists. I do not currently see patients for the purpose of diagnosing or treating ME/CFS, but many of my patients with dissociative seizures have a history of ME/CFS, and there is something very interesting in that fact alone.'

There is something very interesting alone in the fact that Suzanne does not seem to have actually met (m)any patients with classic Ramsay-ME  - in 1990s when she was training, the Wessely/CFS school was just taking root. ME was being 'disappeared'. The patients she sees with dissociative seizures most likely don't have classic ME in first place. (Who knows what they have, given that ME/CFS has become a dustbin diagnosis, thanks to Oxford criteria, so loved by Wessely school.)

But O'Sullivan seems not to be unaware of the problems with criteria. (She really ought to watch Leonard Jason, professor of psychology, his 2014 presentation on case definitions and criterion variance is excellent.)

And we don't ever find out what happens to Rachel, she is not followed up. O'Sullivan also fails spectacularly to describe the experience of probably all of us with ME, of pushing ourselves to recover only to relapse catastrophically.

So, a doctor who is not an expert in ME feels entitled to devote a whole chapter of her book to ME, in which she shamefully undermines all the years of hard work those of us with the illness have done to educate. She is taking the piss. She will not rock the science, of course, it is progressing nicely, but she could well do damage to someone with ME who has faced disbelief from friends or family.

What I have realised, though, is there is little point in railing against the oafs, it only makes you more ill. And to my surprise, even book review threads contain oafs, I did not know this. I was naive and thought that book threads might be a useful way of educating other readers about ME. People who read are nice, friendly, reasonable. Not so.

Oafs abound. And they steal your energy, they are noise in your head. They are self-important, bloated and entirely lacking in self-awareness. They know best, you see. Your thirty-three years of lived illness does not equal their opinion. And they also have a skill of blocking out hard, objective science. They have convinced themselves that 250 000 people in the UK are somatising across the decades. As someone on the book thread said, their blocking out of evidence is a psychologial phenomenon in itself.

The Countess of Mar has written a stonkingly good letter to O'Sullivan and copied it to her publisher Chatto and Windus (and also to Simon W's seemingly joined-at-the-hip friend David Aaronovitch). It is just so dispiriting that Suzanne's publisher saw no harm in her framing of ME as psychosomatic. I guess they just see £ signs (ooh, controversial, edgy science).

The truth is, of course, that O'Sullivan has indulged herself at our expense, and her publishers have indulged her too, by including a neuroimmune illness in a book of 'all in your head' disorders.  It goes without saying that no one in the ME patient/research community had heard of her until a few weeks ago, and yet readers - frighteningly gullible - are willing to bestow authority on her.

Dearie me.

Happily, the Annals of Internal Medicine have just put this very fine NIH  report online: National Institutes of Health Pathways to Prevention Workshop: Advancing the Research on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I have decided not to blog about ME any more, not unless there is good news to report,  advances in research, positive events. I have educated others as much as I can,  but it is simply too draining, physically and emotionally to challenge nonsense.

Science is winning, it always has been.

But in the meantime, I have banished the oafs.

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh; & another doctor turned writer (Suzanne O'Sullivan, who believes ME is psychosomatic) *updated

I'd read a couple of chapters of Do No Harm before I realised that Henry Marsh is the subject of Geoffrey Smith's 2007 award-winning documentary The English Surgeon, which I saw four or five years ago. The film first came to my attention because at that time a production company was planning to use my novel as the scaffolding of a documentary about ME and Geoffrey Smith was the director (it fell through, as these things do, and the film seems now to have halted). I warmed very much to Henry Marsh in the documentary and I love him again in Do No Harm: his humility and self-deprecation shine through his brilliance as a surgeon, he is honest about his faults - he can be short-tempered and vain. He mocks himself for getting annoyed at having to queue at a supermarket check-out when he is an important neurosurgeon. His gorgeous, pared down prose reflects a surgical precision, he says what has to be said, no more, no less. The details of the neurosurgery he practices can be hard to read, I grimaced more than once, and while the technicalities are fascinating,  it is Marsh's humanity and wry humour that makes the book so readable. A doctor who admits wholeheartedly to the luck that is involved in a complicated operation succeeding or failing, a doctor who admits to his own mistakes and can't bear to think of the patients who have suffered at his hands. My favourite line is when he describes how important it is for doctors themselves to experience the anguish of being an angry or anxious relative (or patient) - his baby son had a, thankfully, treatable brain tumour: Doctors, I tell my trainees with a laugh, can't suffer enough.

I often think that doctors who have experienced illness themselves  make better doctors.

*

Not all doctors can write although the publishing world seems awestruck when they do. A new book came to my attention at the weekend by Suzanne O'Sullivan, she has been at Hay promoting It's All in your Head: 'True stories of Imaginary Illness', and the papers have had interviews and extracts. The Sunday Times reported that she controversially thinks ME is psychosomatic. So there you go, a doctor I've never heard of, her opinion slips in like a wee sharp knife - I'm hardly going to warm to her. Still, I can admire good writing even if I dislike the writer's opinions, but the extract in the Guardian is plodding and dull, this happened and then that happened, clichés sprinkled here and there, my interest flagged. And the subject seems derivative, a mix of Oliver Sacks (whose writing I loved) and Elaine Showalter (the horror, the horror!).

Just imagine for a moment you had ME and you were referred to this neurologist, what would she say to you, that it is all in your mind? My consultant neurologist ordered a muscle biopsy and EMG in order to confirm suspected abnormalities, but this of course was pre-'CFS' days (nowadays, you can apparently google 'chronic fatigue', pop down to your local fatigue clinic to get a diagnosis of ME, then get better in a few hours after the Lightning Process, this is one journalist's experience - and he actually confirms O'Sullivan's suggestion that some patients are ill because they google symptoms, he refers to himself as a prolific 'cyberchondriac'. This, of course, is not the experience of patients who have actual ME).

These doctors, such as O'Sullivan, who continue to deny that ME is a physical illness are making a choice not to listen, to ignore the research and abundance of literature, it is very worrying. Their position is  untenable, but still they hang on.  Who benefits? - not patients with ME, that's for sure. The ME Association has just published a report on the harms of CBT and GET as primary treatments for ME, I wonder if it will make a blind bit of difference.

First, do no harm...

Precisely.
_________________________________________________________________________
*Update 

Suzanne O'Sullivan's book does indeed include a chapter on 'ME/CFS' - 'Rachel'.  It is,  unsurprisingly, manipulative and incoherent. In Suzanne's world, you google ME and decide it matches your symptoms and that is what you have got.  (She also patronisingly said on Radio 4: 'I don't think the internet has been so much of a problem for doctors as such, I think it is a problem for patients and people.')

And this may, in fact, be the most revealing passage in the chapter:

'In my early years training in neurology I encountered many patients with CFS, but more recently neurologists have distanced themselves from this disorder and patients are more likely to seek help from immunologists or endocrinologists. I do not currently see patients for the purpose of diagnosing or treating ME/CFS, but many of my patients with dissociative seizures have a history of ME/CFS, and there is something very interesting in that fact alone.'

There is something very interesting in the fact that Suzanne does not seem to have actually met (m)any patients with classic Ramsay-ME (in 1990s when she was training the Wessely/CFS school was just taking root). Rachel, the girl in her book with ME/CFS is, to my mind, an artificial construct, a composite character with the 'behaviours' of ME patients - internet diagnosis, increasingly helpless, 'over-helpful' parents - that the Wessely school adores. Rachel rejects the psychiatric treatment offered her. We never find out what happens to her, though Suzanne says: 'The impact of our emotional well-being on our health is not a trifling problem. I only wish I could convince Rachel of this'.

Her apparent lack of contact with patients who actually have ME - coupled with not following the science - would perhaps explain why she felt that including ME in a book of imaginary illnesses was acceptable. But hallelujah! Suzanne is still at pains to tell us that she does believe we are ill, honestly, she believes us, but we just have to be good and understand that it is all in our heads.

I have reviewed the chapter on Goodreads (and Amazon).

The ME Association has complained to the Times about David Aaronovitch's review of the book - and his re-assertions - yawn yawn - that ME is probably psychosomatic. Invest in ME has also complained to The Times. How many hundreds of hours have we had to waste challenging these oafs?

How many hours?

Doctors & patients & writers ...

I attended a talk mid-week on doctors who also write, a hop and a skip from me. It was a long talk, almost two hours, and I found it so hard to concentrate towards end but it was very enjoyable hearing these three medics talk about their dual lives. You do not come across writing doctors very often and I was especially interested in their concerns about self-censorship when they also have such important social roles as doctors. During the Q&A someone referenced Virginia Woolf's essay 'On Being Ill'  - she wonders why there is so little fiction written on illness - and it seemed a good point to mention The State of Me. I said I was a patient turned writer and that self-censorship can be an issue for all writers. These doctors were all charming speakers - two are GPs, one is a child psychiatrist - and I wonder what their thoughts were when I said I have ME and have written a novel about it, that I was passionate about education through fiction. I did not mention my name or the book's title, but I wish now I had taken copies to give them.

After last week's travesty of science - and Prof Malcolm Hooper has written, as always, an eloquent response - I really have  no idea how we fix the distorted narrative. I think we have to look to the rest of the world, international biomedical research.

I have remembered a BMJ podcast from 2010 where Simon talked about ME. (This was during XMRV hype -  I always remained neutral, if XMRV was the answer, great, if not, let's move on to next thing (and we know how that all turned out). However, I have personally known since 1983 that my illness is connected in some way to my immune response to the Coxsackie B4 virus. The often not very bright media now tries and twists it to make out that it's only since XMRV that patients/researchers have linked ME to a virus. And that no XMRV = no virus. Not so.)

Anyway, in this podcast, Simon speaks around 4.25 mins in about the broad/narrow definitions of the illness, which of course is the whole crux of the conflation and chaos, though he does not seem too concerned with the chaos. The patients Simon sees/researches apparently get better with CBT and graded exercise therapy (GET), whereas those of us with my illness get worse with exercise, and I will keep saying this to those who will not listen. It struck me also that he had spoken back then about the need for other researchers to get involved, and 24 mins in, sounding very relaxed, says: 'Other disciplines should get more involved because CFS is under-researched' ...'and you'd be surprised to learn is actually  a very enjoyable and  very rewarding area of research.'

Very enjoyable and very rewarding.

No mention of the 'acute hostility and bravery' that last week earned him the John Maddox prize. The acute hostility - and I am not questioning that threats were made, I am sure they were, and no one would want to condone this - was, unnecessarily, ramped up to unbearable degrees  last year by a hysterical media, which  resulted in an entire patient population being (further) demonised. We can only wish  that Simon had perhaps practised some self-censorship in his dealings with the media.

Of course, if you actually *know* about the politics surrounding this illness  the Maddox award video seems like a spoof, like something from Drop the Dead Donkey - a newsroom satire from 90s -  an observation made by my mother. They're all daft, she said, shaking her head when I showed her. Bloody bastards, said my stepdad - who now has dementia - and later came into the living room with a pan on his head  - he loves joking with hats - but he has always been a source of great support to us throughout my illness, especially at the beginning, the utter, utter hell.

Am highlighting again this young scientist's blog where an informative discussion went on after the Maddox prize - it makes a change to have a thread where PWME are not drowned out by obnoxious, hostile, uninformed voices. *And then there is another young medic who exuberantly denounced PWME for 'stigmatising mental illness' and told us we have to grow up. He has obviously been fed the Wessely school narrative, and nothing else, but I  hoped he would be willing to educate himself and learn there is another narrative to explore.

After my novel came out in 2008 I breathed a huge sigh of relief, I honestly thought I'd never have to defend my corner again, I felt my job was done. But when we are continually assaulted  - and it *does* feel like assault - by twisted narratives and half-truths, we have to speak up, though it is truly and godawfully  sapping.

We have to speak up. These are our lives.

*I see this page has been removed, perhaps the young medic at www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com had a rethink about being so rude about an illness he clearly knows little about...