Wednesday 11 July 2012

Psychiatrists put their label on poorly understood & under-researched Biomedical Diseases

It seems that Psychiatrists have come up with a new ingenious way to divert more patients away from receiving proper biomedical treatment. In the new ICD11-PHC proposed publication, there are several new entries to include 'Health Preoccupation' and 'Bodily Distress Syndrome' to name but a few.

'Health Preoccupation' essentially enables a psychiatrist to decide at their discretion in the absence of biomedical tests or even a shred of evidence to say that a person is concerned beyond that of 'normality' about their 'percieved ill health'. Firstly one has to question how any psychiatrist can determine this seeing as many so called 'Somatoform Disorders' would actually apply to poorly researched and understood biomedical illnesses. Diagnosing individuals who have a physically debilitating disease with Health Preoccupation will restrict their access to appropriate health care and any medications that help provide symptom relief.

In the case of Myalgic Encepalomyelitis (M.E.) there are now hundreds to thousands of biomedical papers evidencing highly significant biomedical abnormalities. The fact that these abnormalities cannot yet be routinely evaluated using a clinically available blood test, as none are yet widely available. By employment of this classification this enables psychiatrists to subdue and abuse severely ill patients and keep neuroimmune patients within the realm of mental illness. I find it most interesting to note how frequently the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is revised and updated by psychiatrists. New diagnostic criterion does rarely require any objective evidence and psychiatry seems to have a general lack lustre approach to searching for objective biomedical diagnostics to support the presence of their invented disorders.

One wonders how long it will be before conflict between psychiatrists and neurologists will arise. With psychiatric acquisition of many biomedical diseases and the inferior and often deleterious treatment that arises from this. After all it seems that psychiatry has the greatest reach of any medical specialism - they want to be involved with the treatment of ever more diseases as they begin to classify previously biomedical diseases as having significant psychiatric components. Again evidence is almost entirely lacking for their unsubstantiated claims.

It seems that diagnosis of somatoform disorders are not of any use to patient nor doctor. Of course psychiatrists seem to have a chronic propensity to prescribe antidepressants at the drop of a hat, based on the premise that his will perhaps improve the 'mind body connection'. The medical community should go back in time to simply admitting that perhaps they just do not yet know the cause of a disease and further biomedical research is warranted. If they cannot find biomedical evidence of a patent's distress such as is the case with the NHS in M.E. you are not informed by your doctor that they simply do not understand the mechanisms behind the illness - but rather you are told that if you engage in Graded Exercise Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and maintain a positive 'happy go lucky' mindset the prognosis for recovery is very good. This statement could not be further from the truth and so I have found out 5 and a half years on. In depth examination of the PACE trial reveals many flaws most noticeably modification of the primary endpoint definition of moderate improvement, seeing as improvement in levels of 'fatigue' where hardly significant when defined under the initial primary endpoint. 

I remember back to the time that I went up to St. Bartholomews NHS hospital for a consultation with the Wessley school's 'Immunology' man, Dr Murphy who puts on a great front by orchestrating the illusion that they are in fact interested in your blood work for any signs of a real illness. One would think that having the NHS pay for patients to see a consultant who is in fact not the slightest interested in his speciality within this group of patients would be a waste of NHS and therefore taxpayer money. Also evidently there is in reality no need to have psychiatrists run a most inefficacious non-evidence based GET and CBT service across the United Kingdom but rather it should be maintained by clinical psychologists. Useful symptom medications are not prescribed by any of these psychiatrists - after all the primary difference between the two groups is the ability to prescribe by the latter and not by the former. General Practitioners are licensed to prescribe many symptom medications for sleep and pain etc.

At Wessley's nest they also ask you 'Do you think that your illness is a real physical one?'. I decided to contact Dr. Murphy showing him my mitochondrial assay results. My generalised mitochondrial energy score was 0.17 with a healthy individual scoring from 1.0 to 2.0 This essentially means that I was operating anywhere from 17% to 8.5% of the function of a healthy person. These tests have now been further validated proving correlation of scores to that of physical functioning. See: http://www.ijcem.com/files/IJCEM1204005.pdf Unfortunately I did not receive any reply from Dr. Murphy to my letter.

Hemispherx Biopharma the company behind Ampligen are looking to create a test to assess cell free DNA, an indicator of tissue damage. This is essentially what Dr. Myhill and Dr. John-Mclaren Howard have pioneered in the field of ME. It is thought that levels of cell free DNA will correlate with physical incapacity in this disease. Other innovative work includes efforts to examine any correlations between NK cell function (perforin) and disease presence or state. My dream is that these tests will one day be used in conjunction to diagnose ME. I'm sure Simon Wessley is eagerly awaiting these developments. Unsubstantiated claims that this disease is a mental disorder will finally be put to rest and ME will join the ranks of epilepsy, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease in the realm of neuro-immunology.

The current state of affairs with ME would be significantly different if psychiatrists had rigorously investigated the use of potentially effective medical treatments other than simply antidepressants, CBT and GET. But the reality is they have not. Consequently patients have suffered enormously. Evidently if psychiatrists genuinely wanted to help people and take charge of developing therapeutics in this field they would have drafted in researchers from other specialities and would have instigated in depth research looking into the possibility of ME being an autoimmune disease - a concept new to ME which is now being fortified by the ongoing research with the B cell depleting agent, Rituximab.

I'm sure Simon Wessley has lightened the load on NHS finances, manipulating the perception of a disease that is in actuality so severe, so vastly underfunded and has such a great multiplicity of symptoms. It is only to the advantage of government with patients being too physically weak to come out in numbers to demonstrate against this disgusting affair. It is only when one in power gets ill with ME that they will soon realise what a terrible travesty this all is.

Sunday 8 July 2012

Trying to Remedy Unrefreshing Sleep in ME

This is just a quick post I will follow up with further links to studies when I have the time.

Things that can help some people with the paralyzing feeling left over from unrefreshing sleep. I have found that Pregabalin 300mg can increased Slow Wave Sleep Stages 3&4.

Also 5HT2a antagonists such as Risperidone inhibit only 5HT2a receptors at low doses (i.e. 0.5mg) a higher dose will cause side effects and not as selectively target the 5HT2a receptor and thus inhibit other receptors such as D2 etc.

I have found that Pregabalin 300mg combined with Risperidone 0.5 give the best results for reducing that dreadful feeling where you wake up feeling like you've had a seizure - like your head's been kicked around like a football (aka unrefreshing sleep). Take these an hour before you go to bed - you may need to use them in conjunction with a sedative med like low dose doxepin 6-10mg that does not interfere with deep sleep. I use this to get me to sleep. I would not use any benzodiazepines in conjunction with these deep sleep meds because benzos will reduces Stages 3&4 sleep. Zopiclone, zolpidem etc are okay because they do not reduce SWS.

In the near future more potent deep sleep inducing medications will become available in the form of 5HT2a inverse agonists such as Ketanserin. These could provide a safer alternative to Sodium Oxybate (Xyrem).

I have to say though unfortunately I seem to build tolerance to almost all medications and hence I would recommend to administer these drugs in a cyclical fashion, rotating them frequently or if an alternative is not available, coming off them for several days before going back on. This should reduce receptor downregulation to some extent.