13 March 2019 - Chalder - ‘Medically unexplained symptoms’: my clinical and research journey over 30 years

Really just adding this to the calendar:

Topic: ‘Medically unexplained symptoms’: my clinical and research journey over 30 years

13th March 2019

Visiting speaker: Prof Trudie Chalder (King’s College London)

Chair: Prof Patrick Luyten

Location: G12, 1-19 Torrington Place

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/clin...ogy-201819-lecture-series-tickets-48551754605

 

I wonder if she will mention that in a high-level formal legal hearing she was completely unable to provide any evidence for her claim of harassment and abuse from patients?

Just asking for the historical record.

 

Not much of a research journey if the symptoms are still medically unexplained after thirty years.

 

30 Years of Unmitigated Failure

 

My assumption is that her journey is to see how far she could get by failing to properly research medically unexplained symptoms, as she's giving a talk about it she must be quite proud of her lack of achievements.

It's just occurred to me more clearly that where we view unexplained symptoms as a temporary stopping point for conditions, which then get investigated and eventually explained, Chalder and all the rest of them view MUS as the end station - once a condition has been labelled medically unexplained they expect that never to change. Empire/career building to the detriment of patients in other words

 

Only if she is told to.

 

30 years and she has never bothered (or dared) to control for her own bias or that of the participants.

Her training as scientist must have been woefully inadequate.

 

Anyone fancy a trip to London in the spring?

 

Will this madness only be stopped when there have been numbers of deaths from treatable conditions undiagnosed because of the meaningless and harmful fictitious diagnosis of 'MUS syndrome'?

When will such as Prof Chalder admit they have invented a pyschiatric syndrome with no evidence base whatsoever and are pretending it is a diagnosis, and have defined it in such a way as to make achieving any meaningful diagnosis less likely for those poor people subject to what is in effect an unscientific belief system dependent on a logical falacy and on ignoring vast amounts of biomedical research?

 

There's some pretty fast flowing water under some important bridges these days. March is quite a long way off. Maybe @Brian Hughes' book may have become set reading for some students by then? Maybe Carol Monaghan will have got a full debate in the House of Commons by then? All sorts of possibilities.

 

It might be stopped in the UK when life expectancy goes into reverse to such an embarrassing degree compared to our neighbours in the EU and other wealthy countries that it can no longer be ignored. I have read that increases in life expectancy have stopped, and recently that it had reversed a small amount. But the powers-that-be will probably never stop blaming patients. It's so much cheaper than any other course of action... I have no faith in the government or the medical profession of any flavour. The doctors and other medical professionals should have gone on strike years ago to save the NHS. They've missed that boat big-time. In the town I live in there are private healthcare companies popping up on every industrial estate, in huge shiny office blocks. Who is paying them to exist, I wonder.

And think of the savings on the pensions bill.

 

It will stop once all the underlying conditions are finally understood. In the past few years they have lost quite a lot of victims in POTS, EDS, MACS, dysautonomia and others. That still leaves millions, with us likely making up the largest such group along with FM. But they will eventually lose them all as science progresses, as it always does. I doubt anyone faced significant losses for confidently declaring diabetes, MS or tuberculosis to be psychogenic either. They did what every failed prophet does and moved on to another prophecy with equal confidence.

Eventually they'll run out, as surely as the natural sciences eventually ran out of natural phenomena people could point to and, in complete ignorance, declared that not knowing the cause, it MUST be God and nothing else would ever explain it any better so don't bother researching that, it is beyond our human ability.

But meanwhile they will still happily harm us because they never face the consequences of their folly and in fact do very well personally. They built their careers on the suffering of millions, got awards, high-profile positions, even a freaking knighthood. The physicians who published the research demonstrating that smoking was harmless likely did not suffer personal consequences either, even though they knew it was fraudulent.

They won't ever admit fault, though. It will be up to us to force accountability into the system.

 

more stuff to read:
from 2011
Guidance for health professionals
on medically unexplained symptoms
(MUS)
"
This guidance will highlight the importance of clinicians trusting, perhaps more
than they do, their own psychological abilities and the strengths of their therapeutic
alliance with their patients."

https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/CHECKED MUS Guidance_A4_4pp_6.pdf

 

@Sly Saint We could use that link to create a new form of "buzzword bingo" which we could take to any doctor appointments. Then we could have a thread where we could keep score. At the end of the year we could send the "winner" (or should that be loser?) pictures of condolence or sympathy cards as a prize.

 

WTH is meant by psychological abilities? Mind-reading? Telekinesis?

They've fully gone off the deep end, have they? Committing fully to pseudoscientific nonsense as a poor disguise for a modest proposal of "what if we just left the sick to their own devices?"

 

The worrying thing is the advice not to actually assess or medically treat people with an MUS diagnosis, means that currently identifiable and treatable diagnosises will be missed. It seems they are building a way of hanging onto patients that are biomedically identifiable as being in the wrong place, as well as those like us that do not yet have an accepted diagnostic test.

 

Presumably they mean 'clinical judgement', but I suspect that even very experience GPs would have very poor diagnostic success if they had to rely only on talking and looking to make complex differential diagnosis.

It is a very dangerous situation to invent a psychiatric diagnosis of 'medically unexplained symptoms', to say that actually undertaking any assessment will make the patient worse and tell doctors to rely on personal opinion and prejudice. If you don't asses then the label 'medically unexplained symptom' is a self fulfilling diagnosis.