Mind the gap | 30 August 2011

As a break from Westminster, readers might enjoy this article, from the latest issue of the magazine, on the efforts to undertand ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

In 1987, I went to work as a trainee psychiatrist at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen’s Square in London. One of my jobs was to see a group of patients who were not popular with the neurologists who ran the place. The patients had symptoms that might have had a neurological explanation — muscle pain, inability to walk, being unable to think clearly, feeling exhausted after the most minimal physical or mental exertion — yet the neurologists thought that they were at best suffering from depression or at worst swinging the lead. They found it irritating that the patients insisted they had an illness called ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). ‘I can’t understand why they think it’s an encephalomyelitis,’ one neurologist told me. He was a world expert on encephalomyelitis, an extremely rare and usually fatal inflammation of the brain.