United Kingdom: Cases of people with ME/CFS with severe feeding problems, in the media

https://twitter.com/user/status/1630605672575369216

 

I don't think things are simple, in fact.
I agree that @SNT Gatchaman 's suggestions make perfect sense.

BUT. We talk a lot about basing treatment on reliable evidence. I worry that patients are caught between two sets of health care professionals presenting them with opposing analyses neither of which is based on reliable evidence in the ME context. In fact, even @SNT Gatchaman 's proposals aren't in this context (even if they sound very sensible to me).

What we need is some reliable evidence.

 

Ignore the S4ME tweet, posting for the tweet replying to it.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1631029083403321345


Spotted an original tweet

 

I don't want to discuss an individual case. All I can say is that on the evidence available to me I do not think things are simple. My previous post gives the basic reason and it is not just a statement of principle. I suspect it is relevant down to fine detail.

We need to sort this mess out, in general terms. We want to see a happy resolution to individual cases but where we lack detail I don't think we should rush to judge who is wrong and who right and in what respects.

I have some personal experience with this type of situation, as you know, although the variables were very different. We had a happy conclusion but things were far from simple. Risks are very real and every decision affects the options for the next decision.

 

How might jejunal feeding be harder to tolerate than gastric feeding?

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1631395658942009344

 

Would we expect negative views of tube feeding from the patient in this context?

Given what they're already going through, I would expect severe ME patients to be very positive toward tube feeding, although enduring the act of placing them would no doubt be a dreadful burden, as documented by Whitney Dafoe's family, for example. It would need a light touch, calm, quiet, sensitivity and flexibility on the part of the interventional team. If I were doing this now and from what I've learned here, I would know to be quiet and work in low light as much as possible, which is perfectly feasible when you have x-ray vision Here I would draw the analogy with much of medical care involving children - it takes more time and will often be seen as "less efficient" than the typical adult patient with a well understood problem list. The flip side is positive medical interventions will often have a much longer runway in terms of improved quality of life over time.

In my experience families typically go to great lengths to protect these types of tubes, viewing them as a literal life-line. Patients would often come in with devices broken or blocked, or hanging on by a thread having been jury-rigged by the family at home. Once we started employing these types of long-term tubes more frequently around 20 years ago and we realised they were then often coming in acutely with device failure (usually on the weekend or holiday), our nursing team set up a system of pro-active changes, planned for a time that suited everyone. Families might be coming from 100s of km away. They developed a patient database and tried to work out the variables that led to longer or shorter device lifetime (eg nutrient, medication mix) in individuals, and liaised with our suppliers who were very helpful with advice for increasing device lifetime (GJTs are NZD 4-500 last time I checked). Our colleagues in ED very much appreciated this too, reducing acute presentations, or they were able to simply take a phone call and arrange for the family to come directly to us the next morning and save an encounter and overnight admission.

Patients with these type of long-term tubes may have profound neurological impairments with very limited communication, but I found it not uncommon to have the pleasure and gratitude conveyed by the patient, not just the family, following replacement, even when the process was clearly going to be painful through a sometimes excoriated gastric stoma. We would see them over many years and so built up a relationship with these kids and their families and you would learn particular articulations or brief facial expressions - not something a superficial view would ever realise.

Tubes can of course come out, but that is often accidental, maybe catching with wheelchair transfers, or related to uncontrolled movements. In contrast, the severe ME patient, lying quietly in a darkened room might be expected to have very stable tube positioning, unless vomiting is a major factor. As far as I've seen patients with anorexia nervosa are generally the only ones that might deliberately pull an NGT, but even then that seems less common than you might have thought - although I might have a very limited view on that, as we usually only get involved for complicated NGT placements. (AN being a whole other conversation in terms of possible biological causes.)

 

Thank you for explaining the difference, this makes sense.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1631051763359817744

 

BBC Exeter ME patient's hospital care changed after campaign

quote:
The change by the RDE came after her family raised concerns she could die from starvation if her treatment was not changed.

Ms Barrett's father Mark told BBC News: "We are so pleased they have listened and we hope it is not too late."

 

Sorry @Midnattsol I misunderstood as when I read your comment, I thought the sentence continued from the viewpoint of the patient. That makes better sense to me now. At any rate I did appreciate the opportunity to share our longer term experience in other scenarios.

One other point about this whole area is nagging at me. I've seen plenty of unusual and unexplained bowel behaviours over the years, but I can't recall doing diagnostic or interventional gastrointestinal procedures in a youngster with ME/CFS — and that worries me. It's possible some came through but advertised as something different, but I think I'd recall someone with our classic sunglasses and ear protector fashion stylings.

Anyhow I'm hoping to soon be in a little more professional contact with my gastro colleagues again. I used to run their clinical imaging meetings most weeks and am going to try and pick that back up remotely in the next month. If this can work out for me, I'll enquire about our local experience and report back.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1631674185045950468

 

She has been posting on Twitter e.g.

 

Maeve's mother replying on Twitter —

LucyLou on Twitter said (her caps, my bold) —

I fear all these datapoints are suggesting that there is a fundamental failure of understanding across a substantial part of the health service. I'm starting to think that organisations like the NZMC and GMC are going to need to make a definitive statement on this: even institute mandatory training/CME, similar to basic/intermediate resuscitation requirements, across the entire profession before we have a COVID/ME-related wave of avoidable deaths in young people.