Royal Australasian College of Physicians Annual Congress 2018 - Medically Unexplained Symptoms

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians Annual Congress was held in May in Sydney
https://www.racp.edu.au/fellows/resources/congress-presentations-2018

There was a Tuesday session on 'Medically Unexplained Symptoms - Is it all in your head?' with four speakers.


Professor Lorimer Mosely - Professor of Clinical Neuroscience and Chair in Physiotherapy - University of South Australia
(Note - he has spent time at Oxford University)

The link only has one powerpoint slide with the words
'Persistent pain. Medically unexplained but scientifically explainable'.
Which probably says all that we need to know really. If you'd like a little more, there's his website bodyinmind.org and I recommend the 4 minute video.

Lorimer Moseley Body in Mind

Dr David Beaumont
Gives the old around '30% of presentations to primary and secondary medical care are MUPs' story (even though there was a study in a large NZ health authority that found that the percentage of MUPs was actually very small).

Praises the biopsychosocial model; childhood trauma gets a run. A couple of quotes from patients grateful that they now have an explanation for their symptoms. The patient's spelling mistake is highlighted, just to add that little extra feeling of superiority for the medical audience. However, there is absolutely nothing in the slides that explains how the childhood abuse has caused the fibromyalgia.

The Maori Model of Health is of course there - spiritual, psychological, physical, family aspects

The link below gives interesting and very frank reviews of this doctor who moved from England in 2006 and now works as an occupational assessor for the NZ Accident Compensation Commission.
https://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/10475-dr-david-beaumont/

Dr Alexander Lehn
'Functional Disorders and what you can do to help'
Mater Centre for Neurosciences, Brisbane

Suggested approach seems to be to humour the patient

Suggests all doctors can provide CBT to treat functional disorders

• Talk about software and hardware
• Reinforce agency/internal locus of control

Again, no detail whatsoever on the medical mechanisms

Dr Ros Vallings
Auckland, NZ GP Dr Vallings is well known in the NZ ME/CFS community as she is basically the only doctor in NZ with any interest in treating ME/CFS and knowledge of biomedical aspects. She was an author of the good international paediatric primer which she gives a link to in her slides.

Her practice website says that her three specialities are chronic fatigue syndrome, women's health and hypnosis.

She talks about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (no mention of ME) and gives generally accurate information about the illness and current biomedical research.