Letters to the Editors from Dr. John & Co.

PERMISSION TO FORWARD, REPOST & USE IN NEWSLETTERS.
Please urge your listowner to post everything even - perhaps especially
- things they personally do not agree with for fair balance.
If any of my postings is being censored, or selectively edited out, by a
listowner, you may wish to join my M.E. Chums list to get the whole unbiased
picture.

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Letter in response to an article in The Times, 23 July 2008, which asks
Who'll be first to offer disabled people a job?
Journalist Alice Miles finds that the employers she checked didn't have a
very good record.
She didn't check government departments ...
Letter here http://www.mefreeforall.org/2008-Jul-Sep.1017.0.html#c3795
with clickable underlined heading to original article, when you are logged
in.

Cheers
John
drjohngreensmith@mefreeforall.org
Dr John H Greensmith
ME Free For All. org
---

Response to an article in the Glasgow Herald
by patient, Susie Maguire, who tells of how long it
took to get a positive diagnosis of migraine, after being "shunted" around
the health service and given different possible diagnoses, including M.E.

Letter here http://www.mefreeforall.org/2008-Jul-Sep.1017.0.html#c3800
with clickable link on the underlined heading to the original article.
You may leave a comment here, beneath the article, if you register with them
and log in.

If you want to write to the paper (perhaps as well as leaving your comment),
the e-mail address is letters@theherald.co.uk

---

Thanks to Jill Pigott for letting us know about this story in the Worcester
News, "Tiredness that turned me into a total zombie" (30 July 2008).

My letter here

http://www.mefreeforall.org/2008-Jul-Sep.1017.0.html#c3807

suggests that whoever called M.E. "tiredness" has never experienced the difference between the two.

(There is a clickable link, on the underlined title but when I tried,
earlier, it was painfully slow
loading, the article seems poorly framed and it timed me out for logging in
-- Other than that, it's perfect!)

If you want to reply to the letters page, the e-mail address is
letters@worcesternews.co.uk

* * *

These address three of the big problems of CFS patients: we want to work but no one wants to hire us, the medical profession shunts us around, and people have the notion that the only symptom of CFS is "tiredness" and refuse to believe that there are neurologic symptoms as well.  In fact, the symptoms of CFS are so similar to the symptoms of MS that the two are often misdiagnosed for each other.

"Who'll be the first to offer the disabled a job?"  The answer to that is always "the competition".  Every employer agrees in theory that disabled people should be put to work instead of being supported by the taxpayers, but when it comes down to it, no one wants to hire you themselves.  They think every other business should do it, and especially their competition.  But when it comes to their own business, they have plenty of excuses, starting with "it will drive my medical insurance premiums way up".

Government subsidies?  Well, if you can guarantee they won't be abused.  There was a program for the mentally handicapped which paid a portion of the employee's salary for the first few months, in order to prove to employers that the handicapped could be good employees.  At first, the program was going gangbusters, because who wouldn't want an employee for half-price?  But then someone noticed that at the point the employee's salary would have been entirely the employer's responsibility, that employee was fired and a new one was hired, again with the government picking up a portion of the salary.  It became frustrating for the employees, who were repeatedly fired after a few months and had to look for a new job, not really able to explain in interviews why they were fired because they hadn't done anything wrong, and annoying for the government, to realize they'd created a program with so much potential for abuse -- no safeguards prevented this scam, the employers weren't required to keep the employees on the payroll after the subsidy ran out.  But, if the employee really wasn't worth the salary, there had to be a way to let him go without losing the subsidy for the wages already paid, so they couldn't figure out how to fix the problem.