Thanks, Adam. I added a shorter review, focusing on Fox’s history and emphasising the contrast between her views and those of NICE, the CDC, APPG, Javid etc.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/custome...=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1783966173
Terrific review
@Robert 1973, I've taken the liberty of copying it here, given its coverage is very relevant to this thread. Thanks to all who have written those great reviews. I do hope people will click through to vote up their favourites.
"Fiona Fox first came to my attention in a Guardian article by George Monbiot entitled “Invasion of the entryists,” which I would recommend to anyone who is considering buying this book.
In the introduction to her book, Fox confesses to have joined a “far-left revolutionary group in [her] college days” but she attempts to pre-empt any criticism based on that by claiming she was “never a very dedicated communists and always much more interested in pursuing a career in media relations.” Like so much of Fox’s writing, this is misleading. The truth is that she was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) and a regular writer for its magazine, Living Marxism (later called LM), which eventually folded after it was successfully sued for falsely claiming that ITN had deliberately misrepresented the atrocities of the Bosnian war. While some members may have considered themselves to be left-wing, despite its name, RCP/LM was more of a libertarian, controversialist organisation, which shared many positions with the right and has been likened to a sect. Although Fox implies that her membership of this group was confined to her youth, the truth is that she was still writing regularly for LM under the pseudonym Fiona Foster well into her thirties, when, according to Monbiot, she “generated outrage among human rights campaigners by denying that there had been a genocide in Rwanda”. (See also “Genocide? What Genocide?” by Chris McGreal in the Guardian.)
Given the extreme and bizarre views she expressed in LM, and her lack of science qualifications, it is unclear why anyone deemed her an appropriate choice to become director of the Science Media Centre. And her unsuitability for that role is laid bare in the title of the chapter of this book about ME/CFS: “First they came for the communists”.
For those who are not aware, this title alludes to a poem by Martin Niemöller about The Holocaust, which begins: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a socialist”. In other words, Fox is comparing patients and academics who have criticised poor quality ME/CFS research to Nazis. It is hard to imagine a less appropriate title for a chapter about a group of patients who are widely acknowledged to have been institutionally mistreated for decades. But it is not inconsistent with Fox’s history as a writer for LM, or the smear campaign which appears to have been orchestrated against people with ME during her tenure as director of the SMC in an attempt to deflect valid scientific criticisms of methodologically flawed psychosocial research.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that the psychosocial ME/CFS research and therapies which Fox promotes (primarily CBT and graded exercise) have now been rejected by NICE, the Institute of Medicine, the CDC, almost every ME charity and organisation in the world, the All Party Parliamentary Group on ME, and the UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
It has taken thirty years, but it seems that health agencies and politicians have finally woken up, largely thanks to the work of the few heroic patients and academics who Fox treats with such contempt. If you are interested to understand more about the scientific arguments which led to this awakening, I would not recommend this book. Instead, I would suggest reading “Rethinking the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome—a reanalysis and evaluation of findings from a recent major trial of graded exercise and CBT” in BMC Psychology, which can be accessed online for free."
