I gotta hand it to the folks at CounterPunch. Let’s just chalk this up as, someone was taking a much-needed vacation and a shoddy opinion piece accidentally slipped through the editorial review crack. During the the time it took me to read the article and write my response, below, the article was unpublished from the Web. Bravo, CounterPunch.
Sirs,
Your site and its information normally are top-notch, well-researched, sensible and factual. Not today. Did someone declare “Opposite Day” when I wasn’t listening? I urge you to unpublish Julian Vigo’s piece of unscientific drivel, lest your reputation be sent down the toilet by this “science philosopher” AKA not-a-scientist but self-important enough to decide who the real scientists are.
In fact, she cites psychology in trying to prove her point that “science” has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) and Lyme disease all figured out. Former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, debunked psychiatry himself, in his April 29, 2013 blog:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
“While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.”
Ms. Vigo obviously has not kept up with psychiatry for at least three years, yet she feels perfectly comfortable spouting off about real biomarkers of disease being psychogenically produced by witch-victims, all because Famous Psychiatrist Simon Wessely says so. And what does he have to say? We’ll leave it up to him to show Ms. Vigo why Gulf War veterans are in the same dumpster as us CFS/ME/Lyme victims, yet share a common disease mechanism.
See the scientific evidence compiled here:
http://www.ohioactionlyme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/150509_GWI_WESSELY.pdf
From Sir Simon’s January 25, 2006 lecture on Gulf War Illness:
“How were they protected? By what is known as medical counter-measures, so a variety of things were done to give people protection against that risk that you have just seen. For example, people took tablets, known as nerve agent pre treatment set, or NAPS. They are a drug called pyridistigmine, which is a drug familiar in neurology. As long as they were in theatre, everybody was taking these tablets three times a day. Everybody in theatre was supposed to take this for as long as they were there in order to give them protection against nerve gas.”
(Says that nerve agent antidote was given out like candy.)
And here we have published science on nerve agent antidote being an immune suppressant: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106728
“This is the first study to examine the immunotoxicological effects of PYR and demonstrate that this compound selectively suppresses humoral antibody responses.”
Wessely went on:
“We did, however, also look at the central nervous system – that’s the brain, basically. One way of doing that is through neuro-imaging, but we didn’t get the money to do that, so instead we have used sophisticated neuro-psychological testing [not scientifically valid], which has been largely normal in this group as well. [Illustration on screen.] All you need to see here – there are subjective complaints of difficulties in concentration, memory and so on, and these are complaints of problems with depression, and you can see there is a relationship between the two. So the more depressed people were, the more they complained of difficulties in thinking and cognition.”
He blames the veterans and their own depression as the cause of their symptoms, relying on invalid psychiatry, rather than looking at valid biomarkers and provable science. Why? Because Sir Simon “didn’t get the money to do that.” Really? All the power and influence this guy has, not to mention being hired by the Pentagon, and he blames his sorry budget for his being unscientific? It seems CounterPunch might want to look a little deeper into this Pentagon-UK Shrinkology connection before allowing a science denier to quote Supreme Science Deniers in order to trash so-called “science deniers” –the victims themselves–on your site.
In fact, we all have access to the science. One must simply make the effort to read it. And what it says, time and again, is that the immune suppression experienced by Gulf War soldiers (who TO THIS DAY HAVE BEEN GIVEN NO ANSWERS, NO HELP), leading to “chronic fatigue” and “fibromyalgia” (Wessely’s words–see his speech), works just the same way as immune suppression in non-soldiers.
Here, we’ve put a whole bunch of it in one place, to make it easy. https://badlymeattitude.com/2015/10/29/occams-razor-all-we-have-are-dull-blades/
And here, an excerpt:
Scientists who know what they are talking about, regarding Lyme/spirochetes and OspA (fungal-type antigen) as immunosuppressive:
HP Redmond
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Redmond+HP+and+tlr2
Baumgarth
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Baumgarth+and+borrelia
Barthold
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Barthold+and+borrelia
NIH’s Martin and Marques
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Martin+and+Marques+and+tlr2 (<<The NIH’s “Lyme and MS” Division find that OspA-ish lipopropteins shed by borrelia all the time cause humoral immunosuppression with brain inflammation)
CV Harding
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Harding+CV+and+tlr2
AE Medvedev
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Medvedev+AE+and+tlr2
RS Hotchkiss
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Hotchkiss+RS%5BAuthor%5D
Justin Radolf on what else has OspA-sorta in it:
http://www.jbc.org/content/274/47/33419.long
Radolf saying OspA causes immunosuppression:
http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/full/167/2/910
Paul Duray
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Duray+and+borrelia
Duray, talking about EBV transformed cells in the CSF of chronic Lyme victims:
http://www.actionlyme.org/Duray.htm
Duray, talking about immature immune cells in the CSF of chronic Lyme victims:
http://actionlyme.org/IDSA_CLINIPATH_DURAY.htm
Ray Dattwyler, et al (SUNY-SB)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Dattwyler+and+borrelia+and+nk+cells (unresponsive)
http://www.actionlyme.org/DATTWYLER_NK_SUPPRESSION.htm
Benach: Borrelia wreck your brain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Benach+and+borrelia
Cadavid: Borrelia wreck your brain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Cadavid+and+borrelia+and+brain
Gary Wormser on how the OspA vaccines in dogs didn’t work and caused immunosuppression:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10865170
Latov on how OspA vaccination caused the same disease as chronic Lyme:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15363064
Marks on how LYMErix caused the same disease as chronic Lyme:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21673416
Mario Philipp on how Lyme and OspA causes immunosuppression with brain inflammation:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Philipp+M+and++tlr2
An NIH patent, explaining how Lyme causes LYMErix-disease:
“The invention relates to novel antigens associated with Borrelia burgdorferi which are exported (or shed) in vivo and whose detection is a means of diagnosing Lyme disease. The antigens are extracellular membrane vesicles and other bioproducts including the major extracellular protein antigen. Another object of the invention is to provide antibodies, monoclonal and/or polyclonal, labeled and/or unlabeled, that are raised against the antigens. A further object of the invention is to provide a method of diagnosing Lyme disease by detecting the antigens in a biological sample taken from a host using the antibodies in conventional immunoassay formats. Another object of the invention is to provide kits, for the diagnosis of Lyme disease, comprising the antibodies and ancillary reagents. The advantage of the antibodies used in the invention is that they react with the antigens from geographically diverse strains of Borrelia burgdorferi, but do not react with antigens from related Borrelia spirochetes.”
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,217,872.PN.&OS=PN/5,217,872&RS=PN/5,217,872
How do you like your immune suppression? From nerve agent antidote? From a fungally-contaminated vaccine? From a tick bite? From bacterial sepsis? From chronic mold exposure? Super-sized, with fries and a Coke?
Fast forward to July 2015, when news is spreading of high success rates in the CFS Rituximab trials:
They revealed that we “science deniers” who only cite published science (unless some pretend-scientist says something stupid that should be pointed out) put together the puzzle pieces that say damaged B-cells must be depleted by the likes of Rituximab, and there is a 66% remission rate. (See Occam’s Razor, above.) Hmm, Sir Simon appears to do an about-face in that New Scientist article:
“There is now a strong case to be made for a larger trial,” says Simon Wessely of King’s College London, who has treated people using cognitive behavioural therapy. “The belief that [CFS] is all in the mind has been around since the beginning,” he says. “It’s tragic that it might take a study like this to take sufferers seriously.” Oh, maybe since everyone in science says these people are not imaginating their disabling symptoms, and that there are valid biomarkers of illness and that it’s immunosuppression and that getting rid of the bad immune cells so new and improved ones can grow, maybe–just maybe–he should say so too. Screw cognitive behavioral therapy.
Interesting, isn’t it? It’s not one or two scientists saying that immunosuppression chronically reactivates latent herpesviruses, setting off a cascade of fatigue, infections, tolerance to other types of pathogens, badly-cloned B-cells, inhibition of apoptosis–it’s more like hundreds. And Wessely, apparently, caught on that he was outnumbered. Good for him. Now, how about your “science” writer?
How about getting rid of her shoddy, unscientific, unresearched opinion piece?
(They did get rid of it, but an associate was able to obtain a copy: Counterpunch_Science Deniers in the Twenty-First Century.)
Some content on this page was disabled on April 8, 2016 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Julian Vigo. You can learn more about the DMCA here:
Categories: Immunosuppression Diseases, Lyme Disease
An Institutional Form of Murder 
Fun with Lyme Science 
Dear, Dear Mrs. Steere 
Are We Sick of the Controversy Yet? 
badlymeattitude.com 
So you harassed a publication to remove a piece just to repost it? This is completely dishonest. Protest if you will, but we should not be hounding publishers to censor. As much as I might disagree with something I read, the answer is not to throw a tantrum until the world agrees with me.
I usually like your posts, but this has hit a new low.
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What I don’t get is why people post rude comments just because they can. If you call writing a scientifically supported letter to the editor requesting the removal of a wholly fictitious hit piece “harassment” then you’re as bad as that hack who hates sick people. “Waaaah, sick people are gonna come and get me! Stop the harassment!” She’s done it before. Apparently she hates trans people too–and she claims to be some kind of humanitarian and activist. What kind of activist humanitarian writes a hit piece on a systemically abused group who have no recourse but to do their own research and help themselves? Likewise, what kind of person says a thing like, “I usually like your posts, but this has hit a new low”? I’d guess you’re not really a fan, but simply here to harass.
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Actually, Counterpunch has long been progressive news, fighting against the Bigs and Big Finance. (Probably you are not familiar with it.) Therefore, we complained to Counterpunch that this “work” by Vigo was all false, govt spin and unsubstantiated nonsense, proving it, of course, since I am the scientist-whistleblower for Lyme, LYMErix and psychiatry as a hoax (NIH agrees, see Thomas Insel on the DSM).
So, we *PROVED* to Counterpunch that this spin by Vigo on behalf of the criminals whose garbage she was oddly regurgitating as if by rote – as if she herself did not even write it -, was spin and garbage.
Therefore, Peter L., you have no idea what you are talking about.
More about the Vigo incident and the proofs, here:
http://www.actionlyme.org
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I put it in the WayBackMachine this AM because I knew it would get deleted. lol But not sure WBM works on dropbox PDF’s even though it had created a link. Thanks to others who created another link for it so we have it forever and ever!
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Reblogged this on The Other Side Of The Stretcher.
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