Dr Byron Hyde - Canada

Dr Byron Hyde surrenders his medical license

https://doctors.cpso.on.ca/DoctorDetails/Byron-Marshall-Hyde/0016579-21364

 

Doesn't sound good. Grateful for some of his work, but he sounds like Canada's Myhill. Lots of grandiose claims about the disease and its etiology/pathology, lots of annecdotal evidence, a steady stream of desperate patients...

 

Perhaps this shows the wisdom of those who retire by 65.

 

I've read the hearing, but it's not all clear what was so disgraceful, except perhaps for charging a patient $825 for making a chart. It mostly seems a collection of small unprofessional mistakes he made and the fact that he was practising medicine at a level that was beyond his qualifications as a GP.

Hyde admitted that he engaged in professional misconduct, but I suspect it was just to get rid of all the fuss. He is 82.

 

There is a darker side to the ME/CFS specialists, in that they sometimes go down a path of creating a narrative of the illness that is too complex for most doctors to understand and treat. This suits their commercial interests as they can charge more when there are fewer doctors with which to compete for patients. It also creates a dynamic where patients think that effective treatment and answers are being withheld by the rest of medicine because of stupidity or prejudice. This contributes to keeping the illness at the fringes of medicine and science. This is not in our interests.

 

I couldn't have put it better myself. With Hyde, it was an obsession with brain scans and enteroviruses.

 

I guess this’ll just strengthen the people who are always going on about Hyde being the only doctor who can diagnose “true’ ME by claiming he’s being silenced or something. Joy.

 

The charges:

 

Yeah, why is it that a group of ME patients are convinced that Byron Hyde is right and everyone else is wrong? How does it help them, believing that?

 

Wow. That's quite a list.

 

Was this only announced today? His hearing was 6 days ago, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen any angry posts about it (although I haven't been on Facebook or Twitter yet today).

 

To me the main problems seem:

Charging patient A a lot of money (presumably this wasn't the only instance of such behaviour, but merely an instance that resulted in a complaint to the college of physicians).

It seems wrong that an employer would prescribe medication and give psychotherapy to their employee.

 

I wasn't even aware there was such a group. Though I guess this could help explain the smattering of really unhelpful comments I sometimes see from patients... is Hyde responsible for those people?!

 

-KDM (court case, soon retired)
-Cheney (retired)
-Lapp (retired)
-Montoya
-Hyde

Chia next? And then there were none. These old school ME/CFS clinicians are clearly a dying breed, either due to age or the "ME/CFS curse" that universe has laid on any doctor who decides to see ME/CFS patients. I'm not convinced this is a good thing, as there aren't soon any alternatives left for people to go to outside of the BPS doctors. Why are all the homeopaths, "Lyme literate" doctors and other quacks still able to practice, but it seems ME/CFS doctors get scrutinized for any irregularity that could possibly be found?

 

He held the view that ME is a "biphasic epidemic and sporadic enteroviral infectious disease". This info can be found on websites frequented by patients http://www.me-foreningen.info/2017/05/04/baron-hyde-what-is-myalgic-encephalomyelitis/

He also held the view that ME is not CFS and describes CFS as "a syndrome based upon a series of symptoms that are common to hundreds of different, often serious diseases and diagnostic of none".

When the news appeared about a cases of acute flaccid myelitis in children in the US, I saw various patients that believed this was ME (or at least closely related to it). Presumably they believed this because of Hyde. I think it's obvious it's not ME because these children died quickly and health authorities didn't have difficulties finding the virus responsible for it.

 

This sounds like the sort of thing that the silliest patients confidently assert, encouraging others to think that concerns about work like PACE is founded on pseudo science. It would be good if that all went away now.

 

Yep, it's pretty well-known that Hyde believes that ME can only be caused by enterovirus. But then again, many doctors also believe ME is encephalomyelitis of the brain and spine, as the name suggests, which has never been proven to be the case either. Then there are doctors who think CFS and ME are separate diseases, like even Michael Sharpe recently admitted. And finally there are doctors who believe ME is a fictional, invented disease and the disease is believing that ME exists (yes, there are those as well). None of these doctors have had their license revoked.

 

Let's not forget he helped many patients reach their disability pensions. That he helped validate their disease when other clinicians, and sometimes even friends and family, only offered disdain. He at least tried - there aren't many that are willing to even do that.

We worry about a shrinking pool of ME/CFS experts.

Evidently it's not just calumny from their own peers that exerts pressure on doctors to ignore us.

 

For goodness sake, he's 82.

It is unsettling how quickly we turn on one of our own.