Conversing With Professor Simon Wessely

by cfssufferer

CFS sufferer (een ME/CVS-patient uit Australië) heeft de stoute schoenen aangetrokken en

Simon Wessely een aantal zeer relevante vragen voorgelegd (bijv. t.a.v. de diagnosekriteria).

Uiteraard gaat "vriend Simon" niet echt in op de aangedragen feiten en argumenten en

blijft hij volharden in het verdedigen van zijn onhoudbare (bio)psychosociale model voor "CVS".

Gelukkig is Wessely zelf wel heel tevreden over wat-ie allemaal "voor ons" bereikt heeft...

De boeiende konversatie met en opmerkelijke uitspraken van Wessely is in 3 delen opgesplitst.

Klik op een van de onderstaande afbeelding om het betreffende deel te kunnen lezen:

Enkele citaten uit de brieven van Wessely:

uit brief 1:

we have not found the divisions of CFS into some of the categories that are proposed by the Canadian criteria to be helpful. In other words they do not seem to create a homogenous group of patients, and nor can they be usefully applied in clinical practice.

We live now in an era where separating brain and mind makes progressively less and less, not more and more, sense.

What we can say at the moment, and i mean at the moment, is that whilst we do not know what causes CFS, irrespective of which definition you use, we have made a little more progress in understanding the nature of disability, and hence how to improve outcomes.

Having seen over 3000 patients now in my career, i can say that i remain very content and indeed proud of the contribution i and my many colleagues have made in improving the management of this condition, and improving outcomes/quality of life.

At the time of writing I can say with my hand on heart that i believe that the treatments that we recommend and use in our clinic are currently the best there is – and nothing that i have seen, or read about, suggests otherwise.

I do still do my one day a week seeing patients in the clinic, which i still really enjoy, otherwise i wouldn’t do it, but have had little or no dealings with the politics of all this for ages and ages.

So my ability to influence the areas that you wish influenced are practically zero –

you may perhaps be relieved to hear that.

If you look at consistency, then the two main findings are an immune activation (the NK cell story doesn’t seem to have stood the test of time) and the low cortisol/HPA abnormalties, which definitely have stood the test of time.

I outlined all that in the very first paper i wrote 21 years ago in which I first proposed that a cognitive behavioural model was a better explanatory model for chronic CFS than the chronic viral paradigm that dominated back then.

.. – i believe that at the moment every patient with CFS should be given the opportunity to have proper CBT given by accredited professionals in an NHS service if they so want.