"... cheaper than chimpanzees." Experimenting on mental patients & prisoners.

"In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees." - AP story on Yahoo

"ATLANTA – Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital." - Michael Stobbe

If you think the psychiatric industry's push to have ME/CFS categorized as "medically unexplained" and a "psychosomatic" illness has no meaning for you who have this neuroimmune disease or care about someone who has it, think again. Institutionalized mental patients are, for all intents and purposes, prisoners. They become prisoners of mental institutions without the due process of law that those who are accused of crimes are afforded under the law.

In some US states, psychologists and psychiatrists are advocating a change in laws that now require two doctors to sign legal papers authorizing the commitment "for observation" of those who might be "a danger to themselves or others". They want to be able to commit people on the signature of one doctor.

Imagine that you or your loved one goes to a physician who diagnoses the ME/CFS patient as depressed or as somatizing. Imagine the prescription for exercise, talk therapy, drugs. If the patient, knowing her own body and her own experience, refuses this "treatment", she could be committed to a mental institution to enforce "compliance", "for her own good". The death of Sophia Mirza is one of the results of this policy already in force in UK. The men in white coats came to her door, with her mother present and objecting, forced their way in and took her away against her will. It could happen in the US.

Mental hospitals do not have the capacity or the knowledge needed to treat a neuroimmune disease and the multisystem dysfunctions that result from it. To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. ME/CFS patients committed to a mental institution can expect to be pounded into the perceived holes dreamed up for them by psychiatrists, psychologists and physicians who collude with them.

Once committed, patients no longer have the right to "refuse" treatment or even give consent to treatment. They can be, and are, injected with psychotropic drugs against their wishes. And if the psychiatric industry so declares it, the "treatment" for ME/CFS can be GET, CBT and antidepressant and antianxiety drugs. These drugs have generally proven unhelpful for those with ME/CFS. They can have side effects that are permanent. As for exercise as a "treatment", ME/CFS patients are already doing all they can physically, so urging them to increase physical activity is unnecessary and can be damaging.

And what if "resistant" mental illness "requires" ECT - electro-convulsive "therapy"? You thought that went out in the era of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? No, it comes back around in fashion every so often. It's the treatment of last resort in the minds of some psychiatrists, rather like sending the patients to a psychiatrist was in the first place, for the physician who couldn't correctly diagnose ME/CFS in the first place. For the ME/CFS patient already experiencing seizures, being convulsed by electricity as a "treatment" for a CNS that is already fragile could be the last shock it could not withstand.

Research by scientists and clinicians who actually treat biomedical ME/CFS, not the watered-down version invented by the CDC and the NHS in UK, but the Canadian Consensus definition of CFS, has shown that exercise and talk therapy are no more "treatments" for this neuroimmune disease than they would be for other diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, polio, MS, malaria or hepatitis C.

Of course, any sufferer of debilitating disease might benefit from counseling on how to cope, but coping strategies are not treatments for the disease itself.  Any researcher or clinician who acquiesces to this emotional and intellectual manipulation is colluding with the school of propaganda that seeks to inculcate the disinformation that "illness beliefs", present stress from previous childhood abuse, or any other thoughts cause or sustain this disease.

If you don't apply this standard to other neuroimmune diseases, you can't apply it to ME/CFS. Period.

The race is on. Will biomedical researchers be able to prove, create and market a reliable test for the biomarkers already found for ME/CFS before the psychiatric cabal can change the involuntary commitment law and the DSM to suit themselves?

This is why it is such a big deal when the likes of Kim McCleary, Suzanne Vernon and CJ do and say things that chip away at the real biomedical research and those researchers. Delaying and sabotaging biomedical research give the psychiatric lobby, supported by the disability insurance lobby, time to get their plans into place.

For a glimpse into how disability insurers such as Unum operate, read the case of a man disabled with CFS and how many years of harassment, appeals and fighting it took for him to win. Read the judge's list of 13 illegal tactics several insurers and reinsurers regularly use to avoid paying legitimate disability claims. Mr. Merrick was a millionaire and had the means to fight and to survive the fight, unlike the vast majority of those who have already been impoverished by the disease before they try to get disability benefits.

It would shortcut the process a great deal to just have those with ME/CFS labeled as mentally ill, to prescribe GET, CBT and cheap drugs and to then put them away if they don't or can't comply.

Sophia Mirza.....it could happen here. And Kim McCleary regrets that CBT and GET are "not available treatments" in the US, no thanks to her and her cronies.

UNUM Is Still Doing It To the Disabled

UNUMProvident is the gigantic disability insurance company that operates in both the US and the UK.

In UK it advises the Work and Pensions department, a loose equivalent of the US Social Security Administration, on how to “limit liability” - a euphemism for “deny claims”.

According to ConsumerAffairs website on Nov. 13, 2002 UNUMProvident had 30% of the market for disability insurance, making it the largest provider in the US.

It has been rated as the second worst insurance company in the US. A survey of its policy holders found that 45% were either very dissatisfied (36%) or dissatisfied; 45% were “somewhat” (?) satisfied; 0% were very satisfied and 9% were satisfied. The 45% who were “somewhat” satisfied seem to be damning with faint praise. If you add them to the 45% who were dissatisfied you get 90% who were either neutral or negative vs the 9% who were either satisfied or very satisfied.

The above referenced rating included insurance companies that don't offer disability insurance, such as Allstate, the company that ranked worst. I speculate that if car and home owner insurance customers were eliminated from the survey, UNUMProvident would rank as the worst disability insurance provider.

In the last 8 years UNUMProvident has cleaned up its image but has it cleaned up its act?

In 2002 a class-action lawsuit was brought against them in NY. It alleged that UNUM was a “disability denial factory”. Documents provided by former employees disclosed that UNUM gave out a “Vulture Award” for the most claims denied. The lawsuit also alleged that the company used non-medical personnel to decide which claims to deny and then used its 100 on-staff doctors to create a paper trail to justify the decision.

It also came to light that prior to settling with insurance regulators in several states, they offered loans to their claims adjusters and then allowed them to pay off the loans with credits for money saved by denying claims. This ranks right up there with pimps getting hookers addicted to drugs and then controlling them by supplying the drugs, or Mafiosos loaning money and then coercing the borrower into their illegal activities in order to repay them.

Particularly fascinating, since in UK Works and Pensions has decreed that the neuroimmune disease ME/CFS is mental and not biological, is the case of the eye surgeon who developed a “phobia that caused his hands to shake” and couldn't do surgery anymore.

Dr. Randall Chapman had paid premiums for long term disability (LTD). UNUMProvident paid his claim for 3 months and then denied it, saying their doctors disagreed with that diagnosis.

A California jury awarded Dr. Chapman $31.7 million in damages in 2003. In Florida, Dr. John Tedesco, an ophthalmologist who developed Parkinson's disease won $36.7 million in federal court. UNUM then appealed and the cases were settled out of court for undisclosed amounts.

If this had happened in UK, would UNUM have offered these doctors GET (Guided Exercise Therapy), CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and antidepressants for six months and told them to go back to work?

In 2007 the BBC aired at least two reports on UNUM and the job it was doing at Works and Pensions, calling it a “rogue” company. I viewed those reports on YouTube. They can no longer be found on YouTube, nor can they be found by searching the BBC website. It's as if they never existed, but there are references to those broadcasts all over the web, so I know my memory is not playing tricks on me. One of them on YouTube now has an announcement that the up loader has “closed their YouTube account”.

CBS's 60 Minutes program with Ed Bradley reported on UNUM in 2002. Read the transcript for chilling conversations with former employees, including doctors, who say they were pressured to meet monthly income goals by denying claims. One doctor was fired for not complying. California's insurance commissioner called UNUM an “outlaw company”.

See this 2009 article “Denying Disability May Be Just One of UNUM's Profitability Tricks” for one legal firm's take on UNUM as an investment risk. It ends with “...it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for Unum to bank on honesty instead of smoke and mirrors for a change.” - referring to UNUM's investor relations.

Speaking of investors, I wish someone would ask Simon Wessely and the other ME/CFS denialists in UK whether they, their spouses, children or any other relatives own stock in UNUMProvident. Could this be why Myra McClure is "1000% sure" there is no XMRV in UK? Could this be why Wessely told the BMJ Podcast "The cause of CFS onset is irrelevant to management of the condition", and he would not treat viruses in CFS patients even if detected, because he is "in the business of rehabilitation". Commenting on a study that stated XMRV virus was found in two thirds of CFS patients, Wessely said this research "fails to model the role childhood abuse, psychological factors, and other infections may play in the illness".

Policyholders past and present allege that UNUMProvident claims to lose crucial documents from their doctors, their Congressional representatives and themselves. UNUM then denies claims, saying they didn't get the documents in the proper time frame or they didn't get them at all.

UNUM's strategy seems to be that losing in court is just a cost of doing business. It's like a license to steal from all those premium-paying, deniable little people in order to pay the disabled doctors and lawyers who can afford to take them to court, plus rewarding UNUM investors, and their CEO.

In 2009 UNUM's CEO Thomas Watjen received $8.79 million in compensation. Perhaps he deserves the biggest Vulture Award of all.