I actually think it is the exact opposite. The BPS people love it when patients go on about their illness being physical - this is precisely evidence of the 'unhelpful illness beliefs' that started the whole thing off. If patients take the position that they have no beliefs or opinions about what causes the illness then the BPS theory evaporates on the spot. There is no point in using CBT to change beliefs that aren't there!
I see this from the other side - from within the medical establishment. Every time I see a statement about ME being physical I think 'Own goal chaps, own goal.....' The reaction from the establishment is knee jerk and predictable. What people with ME need Carol Monaghan to help with happening has nothing to do with anybody knowing ME is physical. It is to do with finding out what it is by doing research. If we knew what caused ME there would be no need to call for research.
The problem with this for patients is that to us this isn't a matter to be debated, researched and only then proven, once the evidence supports it. That's been part of the issue with this the total discounting of the patient experience until the tests show something. To us, just as if you were shot or contractEd HIV or influenza or meningitis, it's not a question of a doctor saying ah I found your bullet or virus, I can now inform you you have a physical not mental disorder. We know we are physically sick, many of us have a classic pattern of not recovering from a virus, our symptoms from severe pain to sweats, spasms, headaches, flu feelings etc are not conducive with a mental health diagnosis or with ideas of deconditioning/dysregulation. When I went to my Drs , not with fatigue but with failure to recover and enduring "sickness behaviour" I didn't go saying what can this be am I mad or depressed , I went to find out why I was staying physically ill, and as a community we have to have right to assert that without that assertion in itself being seen as unfounded without proof etc or a sign that we are prone to unhelpful beliefs. That doesn't mean, as Jen breas films shown, that we aren't vulnerable to after time being worn down by the disbelief and start to question Ourselves once it's asserted that our symptoms can't have organic cause and must be psychosomatic as many of us have been told.
I don't have to stay neutral about causation And I'm not going to. Merryn croft case is great illustration of this - lively young girl, wonderful family, extreme pain and debilitation with absolutely no psychological explanation, clearly physically unwell despite in her lifetime not being able to have the scan or blood test to prove it. And even then, are we really without evidence, with the CPET tests etc, such as with the young fitness expert chap Jamie on the documentary by Ryan prior, who simply had this abnormal response to exercise not caused by deconditioning , I don't see why we are supposedly in a state of just knowing nothing, w.ith no proof of physical illness. IOM didn't think this. I find this position confusing.
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I fully accept ME being an illness where course and progression and outcome can Be acutely linked to management, PS factors can be important, the trouble with accepting a bps model in any way , Is the biological is so sidelined and some people have zero PS causation or perpetuation but are treated as iF they don't have a genuine, illness Unaffected and undetermined by their own beliefs , actions and lifestyles . Isn't it time we made it very clear this is a serious systemic disease "primarily" with the PS relegated to clearly only secondary and clearly not inherent status.
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