Byron Hyde MD
The Nightingale Research Foundation
I am in an unusual position among ME/CFS disabled individuals. I am probably the only one in North America who has certain curious qualifications.
(1) I have been studying the disease processes leading to this illness since 1984 like Dr. Bell and a few others.However, there is more. Due to the curious health systems in the world,
(2) I and physicians in Canada can access any medical test available in Canada without cost to the patient. There are a few exceptions and these in the area of Neuropsychological testing that costs circa $1,500 and QEEG that are computer driven EEGs but we do access these at no cost for native Canadians and those whose cases I aminvestigating for unions. Patients involved in court cases can also get their costs back if they win and I usually win in court if I find sufficient grounds to take on the case. Other Canadian physicians can do the same think but few have the time in on investigation and in addition you simply cannot earn a living in this type of work. So no other Canadian physicians have done what I have done simply due to the fact they would be bankrupt. I makemy funds by winning legal cases for my patients. Believe me it doesn't make much money in Canada and any school teacher would be paid more than I am. However the work is fascinating and I wouldn't leave it for any money. The Americans are blind sided to some degree since they cannot write the tests on every patients that I do since their private and government insurances simply do not allow this. In addition, it is my belief that most clinical research is performed in the US with patients who are on welfare, who have no insurance and who claim they have ME/CFS to obtain free medicine. Many of these people are depressed or mentally aberrant and so this skewers the US figures. I worked for one day in a very prominent US clinic that produces an enormous amount of CFS paper and literally none of the patients had been accessed to any degree and most were depressed or suffering from obvious problems that it serves no purpose in getting into.
In my investigations of ME/CFS patients I find pychiatric disease but only in 3-4% of patients investigated and this is clearly less than the amount of psychiatric disease found in the general public. Why should this be. Cleary my population of ME/CFS patient have achieved considerable academic or financial advancement in relation to the general public prior to their falling ill. To achieve these goals one has to be not only bright but also must have less depression or other limiting psychiatric diseases. Over 15 years we reviewed some 2000 of our patients and what we found was that the biggest incidence of illness by profession per 10,000 population and this was among lung assessment technicians, all in constant contact patients with chronic or acute infectious diseases.
The group of ill patients in sheer numbers were those in the health and teaching professions. Front line workers in infectious disease. Among these two groups, the individuals who had the highest levels of illness were health care workers and teachers involved in residential schools and hospitals for the mentally ill or chronic disabled children. In both environments, areas of rapidly spreading infectious disease and those with decreased cleanliness caused by their disability and proximity. Then again there are the multiple epidemics, several that I have studied personally. One has to come to the conclusion that we are dealing with the consequence of infectious disease.
Who among these groups actually fall ill since not all of them do. That too has become increasingly clear.
(1)_ Individuals with previous significant head trauma so that the blood brain barrier is probably injured and allows infectious disease more ready access to the brain,
(2) individuals who have prior immune dysfunction
illnesses or conditions and more likely to become involved in autoimmune diseases,
(3) patients who have an employment where work & home conditions allow them to become chronically over exhausted such that these individuals cannot react to routine infections with a normal immune response,
(4) patients in the first few weeks after receiving Recombinant Hepatitis B immunization where some may be immune depressed at the time of immunization and some may encounter a neurotropic infection immediately after immunization.
Recombinant Hepatitis B immunization is manufactured to form a sequence of the surface antigen of Hepatitis B and although this sequence is not infectious nor can it apparently be reproduced in the body, the surface antigen of Hepatitis B is known to paralyse the immune system temporarily and allow minor neurotropic infections to become chronic and recognized as self during this period of immune paralysis.
I don't believe that those pushing for a psychiatric identity for ME patients have ever done any in depth investigation of their patients.
Psychiatric definitions tend to be made on a shoot from the hip basis in which the physician acts on total faith of their own mythology and simply has turned their backs to the wealth of investigational tools that we have today. As you also know, many physicians and psychologists who have attempted to state these patients are primarily or in a large part psychiatric are supported by the pharmaceutical industry or insurance companies in various manners.
This connection also gives these individuals vast abilities to access the medical medias of publication of "scientific literature".
Byron Hyde MD
The Nightingale Research Foundation
121 Iona Street
Ottawa, Canada, K1Y 3M1
Posted by peter200015
at 11:03 PM EAST
