The MEA purple booklet campaign – ‘Telling GPS the Truth about ME' – pushed all the right buttons.
Three thousand copies of the booklet were mailed out to GPs and other medical and healthcare professionals – with many patients following up by hand-delivering copies to their own doctors during surgery visits.
And, as luck would have it, contacts made during the campaign led to copies being requested by medical libraries the length and breadth of the UK and by health service commissioners and deliverers in various parts of the country.
The campaign kicked off with a big mail out in June and continues to this day in a smaller way.
If you think your doctor or ME/CFS specialist would benefit from seeing a copy of the booklet – and providing you haven't already done so – please email the name and address of your doctor to administration@meassociation.org.uk and we'll take it from there.
The campaign was made possible by a stream of generous donations and sponsorships to our Big Give Christmas Challenge at the end of last year – which resulted in a grand total of £10,000 being raised. Many of the donations attracted Gift Aid. Thank you too everyone who supported that.
Candis, one of Britain's top selling women's magazines, also came up trumps. Included in the grand total was a substantial extra sponsorship from them after all the other money was in. The Candis Club has donated £54m to health charities since 1962.
Their senior features writer, Amy Salter, is in fairly regular touch, asking for story ideas.
To buy a copy for yourself, please click on this link: www.meassociation.org.uk/?p=4038
We received this lovely endorsement for the campaign last week – from someone who asked for it to be sent to her doctor:
” It’s a quarter of a century now since my family was struck down with ME and in all that time we have never had a single medical personnel who supported us (when it came to ME) or acknowledged our illness as anything other than psychological, apart from a consultant who diagnosed us in 1991
“After the experience I wrote about below we eventually did find another GP and he has been helping us and was kind enough to give us extra time at appointments and so on because my daughter is so ill. However we were not sure about his thoughts on ME and as usual dare not mention its name.
“At my daughters last appointment we went in, sat down and the doctor said “have you seen this, someone gave it to me”, where upon he rummaged below his desk and triumphantly produced a well thumbed copy of the latest purple book, well! we were totally astonished and delighted all at once but riveted to our seats,we just couldn’t take it in or respond.
“He asked if we had seen it before but we didn’t let on that we had been instrumental in a copy being sent to the surgery. He happily proceeded to look through the book to check up on medications he was about to prescribe to my daughter, totally unaware of the momentous occasion it was for us. He mentioned that there were interesting new treatments being investigated but he wasn’t able to prescribe them at present.
“He opened the door for us to work together and talk about ME symptoms and possible treatments for the first time ever in our experience, and of course it will not be lost on any other ME patients he may have.He had obviously never seen the book before, I think is a wonderful success for the ‘Telling GP’s The Truth Campaign’ I can only thank you so much and I hope there are many more little successes like ours out there. “
That really is a great success story for the purple booklet campaign unfortunately it didn’t have the same effect on my gp, had an appointment last week he said he didn’t know what else to do maybe I should see a different gp.