By David Tuller, DrPH
Last month, the BBC covered the situation of Beth Dobbin, a champion sprinter who has been so disabled by ME that she is “bedbound for 22 hours a day,” per the story’s headline. Six years ago, Dobbin, now 32, competed in the summer Olympics in Tokyo as a member of the British team.
The story received a huge amount of attention and was picked up by news organizations around the UK and beyond, often as part of their sports coverage. In an X post a few days later, Dobbin wrote that she had received “thousands of messages on multiple platforms” and was “overwhelmed” by the response. She also reported that she had followed up the interview by sending an appeal for research funding to Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
Dobbin included the text of the letter in her X post. Here are two key paragraphs:
“You may have seen my recent interview with BBC Sport. It’s had over 1 million views on both Instagram and X, triple the amount of anything else posted around the same time. I believe this is a reflection of how many people are suffering with the same illness. There are over 400,000 people with an ME diagnosis in the UK. Charities estimate the actual figure is around 1.35 million due to it taking on average 6 years to receive a diagnosis. ME is almost always a post-viral illness, so the amount of people impacted since Covid has, and will continue to increase.
“ME has been neglected and psychologised for years due to 80% of sufferers being women. It has received so little government funding for research over the years compared to other illnesses. As a consequence, there are no approved treatments. There are also currently no provisions within the NHS for severe ME patients (25% of those with ME). What other illness this prevalent would leave patients with nowhere to go within the NHS, or no specialists other than to seek private care?”
The BBC followed up its initial article with one specifically focused on Dobbin’s letter to Burnham. Meanwhile, hundreds of other sportspeople signed a group letter to Burnham in support of Dobbin’s appeal. The Times covered this event with an article headlined “Olympians demand better ME funding after sprinter Beth Dobbin speaks out.” Two organizations—ForwardME and ThereForME—have posted guidance and a template for anyone who wants to write a similar letter to their local member of Parliament.
Not surprisingly, Dobbin’s advocacy has met with some resistance from the dedicated members of the biopsychosocial ideological brigades. Paul Garner, the physician who claimed to have cured himself of Long COVID with his strong manly thoughts, has mounted a rebuttal with an article posted on the The Recovery Channel, a site he co-founded. It is his latest effort to evangelize on behalf of so-called “mind-body” interventions like the Lightning Process, the Gupta Program, and related programs that promise to treat and cure dozens of heterogeneous conditions.
The evidence cited in favor of these intervention consists largely of first-person testimonials. Such anecdotal accounts do not constitute credible evidence that an intervention is effective. The few clinical trials that have been conducted, and those ongoing, are unblinded and generally rely solely on self-reported, subjective outcomes—a study design that generates an unknown amount of bias.
Citing “recent widespread media coverage of an Olympic sprinter’s ME/CFS,” Garner’s post asserts that “people can find a path out.” How? Here’s the secret:
“Part of recovery is about realising it is possible, and this can sometimes come from discovering stories of others who have recovered…For some, recovery has started by being open to a “mind-body” explanation for symptoms. With advice, support, and a growing sense of agency, what seemed impossible can become a reality.”
The Recovery Channel article highlights three athletes who reported having recovered after having being sick. Garner posted the article on X, declaring that “you can recover from psychological and behavoural approaches” by “being OPEN to current psychophysiological explanations.” Presumably, he would argue Dobbin could do the same if only she were “OPEN” to Garner’s views on the matter.
Garner has more than 5,600 X followers, but most of his posts appear to receive less than 1000 views, per the analytics. This one received almost 20,000 views. Judging from a quick scan, many or most of the respondents were critical of Garner’s perspective.
Among those who responded was Anil van der Zee, a bed-bound former dancer who recently received a royal honor in the Netherlands for his ME/CFS advocacy work. In a post on X, van der Zee highlighted the reality that a great many patients have tried mind-body interventions and found them unhelpful, or worse. As he wrote: “The problem is many were open to these explanations. Unfortunately that didn’t help me as a professional athlete. On the contrary.”
