After
my FT letter, I received an email from a scientist who told me that he was “attacked” by the KCL psychiatrists et al at a Royal Society of Medicine meeting in the 1980s. They claimed that his data could not be trusted because he was diagnosed with post-viral fatigue syndrome and he had vested interest in a positive outcome.
Patients have a vested interest in the truth, not a positive outcome. Researchers with financial and professional conflicts of interests are the ones with vested interests in positive outcomes. And yet it is the latter which have prevailed for 30 years.
The scientist in question has had ME for 40 years and is very unwell. His treatment by Wessely et al clearly still hurts very deeply.