Poor Science Reporting in the New Scientist

MAY BE REPOSTED

The MEA has sent in the reply below to an article in the current issue of the New Scientist magazine:

<http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/mg201269 97.000-when- illness-is- mostly-i
n-the-mind.html? full=true>
http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/mg201269 97.000-when- illness-is- mostly-in
-the-mind.html? full=true

INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION

RE: started off as 'When illness is mostly in the mind' but later changed to 'How people can think themselves sick' - 11 March issue of NS by Clare Wilson

Editor-

As a doctor with no mental health problems who developed ME/CFS as a result of a chickenpox encephalitis I can fully understand why people with this illness feel so angry when it is flippantly described as '...almost all in the mind' or 'How people can think themselves sick'.

Having an inaccurate or derogatory psychosomatic label attached to a condition creates all kinds of practical problems for patients - inappropriate or harmful treatments and refusal of certain benefits in particular - as well as discouraging biomedical research into the underlying cause.

Fortunately, there are clinicians and researchers who believe that ME/CFS has a solid physical basis involving infection, immunology, endocrinology and neurology. As a result the Medical Research Council has just set up an Expert Group to look at these areas of causation.

When it comes to treatment, The ME Association has just completed analysing the results from the largest survey of patient opinion ever carried out(4,000+ respondents). Not surprisingly, these results clearly show that over 50% report that behavioural treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) are either ineffective or harmful.

So please can the New Scientist return to the more objective position it took in 2006 (1) when it reported on neurological abnormalities in the spinal cord (ie dorsal root ganglionitis) in a 32 year old woman who died as a result of having ME and in 2005 (2) when it reported in abnormalities in gene expression - neither of which could possibly be caused by abnormal thought processes.

Yours sincerely

Dr Charles Shepherd

Hon Medical Adviser, ME Association

7 Apollo Office Court

Radclive Road

Gawcott

Buckinghamshire MK18 4DF

Website: www.meassociation. org.uk

REFERENCE:

(1) Hooper R. First official UK death from chronic fatigue syndrome. New
Scientist, 16 June 2006.

(2) Hooper R. Chronic fatigue is not all in the mind. New Scientist, 21
July 2005



I was also moved into replying:

Please, New Scientist, where is your quality, unbiased reporting?

You are at best, giving web space to old, ill-advised science and at worst 'advocating' an indisputably dangerous 'treatment' regime that has left participants incapacitated and dying. I'm talking about GET here and not CBT.

Psychiatrists of this ilk ignore the 4,000 plus biomedical papers produced on the biological nature of this illness and continue to spill out the same old 'facts' and figures taken from their woolly scientific work. Funding provided for the psychobabblers is given to the detriment of true biomedical studies and it's time this nonsense stopped.

Let's move on now and concentrate on the advances made in the fields of immunology and epidemiology. This is where real science is headed.

Andrea Pring


What are your views on the subject?