SUFFERERS of the chronic tiredness condition ME have stepped up their call to restore a specialist service in East Lancashire.

Members of the Blackburn and District ME (Myalgic Encephalitis)/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) Support Group were devastated when a special clinic to treat the condition was stopped. The clinic was run at Royal Preston Hospital by consultant immunologist Dr Norman Williamson who has now retired. The service has been discontinued and officials at East Lancashire Health Authority have said there are no plans to introduce an alternative specialist service for local ME sufferers.

But the support group has now written to the six new primary care groups which will begin operating in East Lancashire from April to ask for their help. The primary care groups will play a leading role in the purchase of health care in their districts.

In the letter, Audrey Atwood, group leader of the support group, which has more than 150 members across East Lancashire, says: "We are concerned that a great many medical professionals are lumping together all chronic fatigue syndromes under the heading of depression, ignoring or dismissing all the evidence from around the world that ME is different and not a depressive but a physical illness along the lines of multiple sclerosis.

"Insisting that everyone is improved by rigorous exercise regimes flies in the face of research.

"We would therefore ask you to please consider recommending that a clinic, preferably along the lines of the National ME Centre, be set up for patients in East Lancashire and that clinicians truly interested in ME as a physical illness be recruited to run it.

"It is not right that patients with ME are left to cope as best they can on their own and are bullied into exercise regimes which are counter productive or are faced with travelling long distances which many are incapable of doing."

East Lancashire patients can currently referred for psychiatric treatment in Manchester or Leeds.

But Mrs Atwood says she is "alarmed " at the long distances people have to travel and the fact that the only provision is for psychiatry. Dr Stephen Morton, East Lancashire's public health director, has said that the condition should be managed by GPs who should refer to a hospital physician if they had concerns.

He said the term, ME, had fallen out of use and the medical consensus was that the condition did not fall within the workload of am immunologist.

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