The ME Association is pleased to announce that we have been informed by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) that they will now remove their classification of CFS as a mental health disorder.
Dear Dr Shepherd
I am pleased to inform you that the Curriculum Development Group and Postgraduate Training Board have now debated the views expressed about the reference to CFS/ME in the Mental Health statement and have agreed to remove the reference from the statement. It was not felt necessary to insert a specific reference to CFS/ME elsewhere in the curriculum, eg under Neurological Problems, because the curriculum takes a largely
generic approach and does not specify every possible condition.
We remain happy to have a meeting with you and I am sorry that it has taken so long to arrange this.
Yours sincerely
Ruth Palmer
Director, Professional Development & Standards
Royal College of General Practitioners
14 Princes Gate, Hyde Park
London SW7 1PU
This is very good news.
I appreciate the RCGP’s curriculum is generic but I should have thought ME/CFS might be severe enough as an illness to merit a specific mention under Neurological Problems – do they mention MS?
Good news. Well done. I hope in your upcoming meeting that you will be able to persuade them to place it under neurological diseases.
Also, I hope this quickly leads to Cochrane removing ME and CFS from under common mental disorders and placed in an appropriate category (I forget how they group diseases and which would be right for us). Have you contacted them as well? They not only strongly influence all practice in the UK, but in much of the rest of the world as well. For eg, many Canadian provincial medical board subscribe to Cochrane. This causes great mistreatment and non-treatment of patients. As well as lack of funding etc.
I’m sorry to disappoint, guys! But this is old news. This post dates back to July 2008. – Tony at the MEA.