15. A Collective Raspberry at Functional Fairy Tale Disorder

I started a short course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) last week. 

A review appointment with a Neurologist last year resulted in his suggestion that a course of CBT through the local MECFS service would help me return to work, after several months sick leave. I told him that I'd be more than ready to admit I had mental health problems ... if I did! He said I'd got him wrong, that he was suggesting CBT to support me to cope with returning to work with a chronic health condition. 

He's a Neurologist who writes and presents widely about Functional Disorders and is clearly careful not to draw his patients' attention to the fact that the term Functional Disorder seems largely to imply an all-in-the-head diagnosis. He encourages that patients are told 'your illness is very real', 'I believe what you are saying' and you are experiencing symptoms that are 'very real to you' ... but ... whatever is said ... many doctors still believe Functional Disorders have no clinically provable symptoms and therefore are all in the head.

The name Functional Disorder is descriptive of the malfunction of multifarious body parts in the absence of any neurological signs shown by neurological testing. I can't say whether my Neurologist counts MECFS separately or if the chronic condition I am returning to work with is, in his mind, a Functional Disorder. 

He writes a piece for other doctors, that is accessible on-line by patients, and in it says that you can 'trick' your patient to say, 'Yes' when they feel you touch them and 'No' when they don't and they may say 'No' in the area they believe is affected ... but be careful ... some darned annoying patients (my words) may suss out what you've done. What a jolly jape; we can catch our patients out and prove they are imagining or exaggerating non existent symptoms, by tricking them.

He writes:
'The more physical symptoms a patient presents with the more likely it is that the primary presenting symptom will not be explained by disease. A long list of symptoms should therefore be a “red flag” that the main symptom is functional.'

MECFS has a long symptom list. Luckily now biomedical research is leading to promising results with Ampligen and Rituximab that point to MECFS being a disorder or even perhaps a disease, a real, bona fide disease of the immune system with associated physical symptoms, even a looooooong list of associated systems. The Norwegian scientists researching Rituximab as a possible cure suggest that MECFS patients may have too many B cells in the lymphatic system ... the B cells fight against infections ... if there are too many B cells, the extra ones attack the body - many different parts of the body - when there is no further infection to fight. That would surely involve a long list of symptoms in various body parts. If it can be proved, then everyone with MECFS can join together in producing a LARGE LOUD raspberry to Neurologists who have humoured our so called Functional fairytale Disorder for so long.

Oops, this started as a piece about CBT but my 500 words are over and I haven't even started on it. Next time!