UK Parliamentary debate today - Thursday 24th January 2019

Well he was very short of time wasn’t he? One thing I did agree on , since they seemed to let the other debate over run, it was poorly arranged because it wasn’t a satisfactory ending to the debate, the amount of time he had he couldn’t cover much which would have been good to hear. Or he had a page full of stuff he couldn’t face reading after all,,,

 

Well do you agree with that?

 

Possibly even because certain media-silencing lobbyists are maybe not so powerful in this instance?

 

Roger the Dodger used to have a whole book of evasion strategies. Maybe SB had a copy.

@NelliePledge made her comment as a form of sarcasm ... she meant that SB obviously is in a position to do stuff.

 

I won't stick up for him as I'm disappointed with his response and I'll be writing to him as my MP to tell him so. But he had loads of notes and did add a lot throughout the debate and seemed to only read about half of what he had prepared. The page I referred to before was a list of what money had gone into funding which took up the whole page!

ETA: Deleted final paragraph for confidentiality reasons!

 

Well I still don’t know what was meant, but moving on.

 

Really a whole page on funding? how can that be? If he came to the first debate there wasn’t much progress to report, he seemed a bit frustrated at having to come to another one and really only offered action on GP education.
If he’s your MP it must be nice to be writing to someone more powerful and involved than the average MP.

 

While I understand and sympathise with people wanting more, I'll chip in with an observation. Part of the basic political philosophy of conservatism is that even if things are bad, it is often worse to try to change things because they feel there is a high potential of making things worse.

If you measure the state of parliamentary opinion there is a clear direction in our favour. Not long ago, a few lone voices would try to bring up the situation and got drowned out by others saying everything was fine. Now we have even Conservative MP's willing to stand up in public to say everything is not fine, and things need to change. This is now a public position. There are probably more who have reservations but are not willing to say so publicly yet. The easy way out for politicians is to send a few form letters out and privately send their commiserations, etc etc.

Yet, a minority have now decided to make a public statement. There were no politicians willing to stand up and make a speech about how important institutions are under attack by militants. There has been no media deriding us. The amount of London based media willing to find an angle to even question a motion led by a female member of a Scottish Independence Party attacking institutions and practices is a good sign. I cannot think of a party in Parliament who are less liked by the London media than the SNP (excluding Sinn Fein, but they don't take their seats). All the ingredients for a tabloid attack where there, yet there were none.

 

The only counter psychosocial ideologues have ever used has always been: our critics are just butthurt whiners who don't like what our research says. Now the PR strategy has to be adapted to fit with mounting criticism that grows in scope as well as in depth. It will likely be that people are just confused and they'd agree with them if they understood their important work (have you really read the paper?!).

But right now years of "militant activists" just got a bit complicated to explain in hindsight, especially since it never was true. If only people inquired about that weird discrepancy, somehow... some... profession or professions of people interested in figuring out what is true and what is not...

 

Sorry too ill today to see if this has been mentioned today in this thread, but it looks v likely the 90 min online RCGP educational course for GPs mentioned by the Minister Brine is the METRIC one discussed in photo on left. The info in the photo says materials for this course were based on the FINE retrial, sister trial to PACE! So bps based, terrible. Note FINE trial results were null. Would be good to know for definite if online course is the one discussed in photo. Certainly seems so.

 

There is a risk to the entire MUS edifice if GET/CBT and PACE get dumped for ME, as this is about the only evidence they have. Also if this fatally flawed methodology is lost to them, they have no where research wise to go next.

If it is recognised they are barking up the wrong tree with ME, indeed that they have deliberately distorted the evidence, how long before people began to recognise that the entire MUS house of cards is a pseudo psychiatric diagnosis that has no evidence base what so ever?

 

This

 

I think it's worth digging into the courses delivered to GPs, if possible. That the courses seem to draw upon, and that the RCGP cited, FINE as evidence when it literally concluded that it's useless treatment is just... bonkers.

I think the content is likely to match the other NHS content where it's explicitly and unambiguously stated that it's psychosomatic and advise to withhold all treatment as quickly as possible because it feeds the imaginary cycle of unhelpful beliefs. "Remember: there is no disease" did not come about randomly, despite the implausible deniability about it being some old pamphlet that was mistakenly taken out.

Maybe get some other training material dispensed elsewhere, too. There is a lot more than the trials and NICE guidelines. It's clear that much of the training material has been largely kept out of prying eyes and is likely completely disastrous. It would also explain how disinformation has affected training and attitudes in medical professionals, leading to the present abysmal outcome.

 

I also think that's why there is so much resistance. As I said before, I think ME is a stepping stone to a big ideological project for the psychologisation of illness and the return of psychosomatic medicine to its glory days, before most of its original misdiagnosed patient population were taken away by research. This is purely ideological and we are just one piece of it, albeit a foundational one.

IAPT has been about £1B and utterly disastrous. That's a lot of sunk cost and escalation of commitment. Careers are on the line. Promises that cannot be taken back will be revealed as a flash of hot air, massive embarrassment all around, cats and dogs getting married, the whole nine yards.

 

Creating a basic account on the RCGP website allows you to access this particular e-learning course (I just put 'volunteer' for my profession when creating an account). I'm just working my way through the course, so can't comment on its content yet.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1088901240124252160



I've started a thread on it here:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/metric-uk-royal-college-of-gps-online-course-on-me-cfs.7842

 

@Simbindi and @Tom Kindlon, thank you, will read soon as able, sounds bad as we feared.

Minister Steve Brine also said ME is identified as a key area of clinical knowledge in the GP’s Applied Knowledge Test in their qualifying GP exams. Does anyone know how this material could be accessed as well? Thank you.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1088928580304801798