Category Archives: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

ME isn’t 'all in the mind’, but it’s still a mystery

As medical adviser to the ME Association and an ME sufferer, Dr Charles Shepherd has spent the past two decades vigorously fighting the dismissive attitude still common among the medical profession. Here, he talks about the latest research into the disorder

‘A significant minority of doctors still don’t believe in the existence of ME. They refuse to diagnose or manage it – that is totally unacceptable,’ says Dr Charles Shepherd

By Caroline Lavender

7:30AM GMT 26 Nov 2012

It was in the late Seventies that Charles Shepherd became ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME as it is better known. It was an era, he recalls, when the condition was still dismissed as “hysterical nonsense” by most clinicians. Working as a young doctor at Cirencester Hospital, he had contracted a severe case of chickenpox from a patient with shingles. “I’d been perfectly fit and healthy. The infection had resolved but I felt mentally and physically knackered and kept having to take more and more time off,” he recalls.

Gadget lets you control computer with your eyes

A researcher in London has created a low-cost device which allows wearers to use their eye movements to control a computer

By Tom Levitt, for CNN
September 24, 2012 — Updated 0848 GMT (1648 HKT) |
A researcher in London has created a low-cost device which allows wearers to use their eye movements to control a computer

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • New low-cost glasses allow you a wearer to control gadgets, even objects with their eyes
  • Eye-tracking equipment could help Multiple Sclerosis and other brain disorders
  • Technology could start a new era of hands-free computing

(CNN) — Take two video-game console cameras and one pair of horn-rimmed glasses and for around $30 you have a device that will allow you to control a computer or, potentially, even a wheelchair with your eyes.

Previously, if you wanted to buy similar eye-tracking equipment it would have cost you upwards of $8,000. Now, scientists in London have pioneered a device, the GT3D, using components anyone of us can buy from the shopping mall.

Chronic fatigue syndrome: Brain training is most cost-effective treatment

The cause of Chronic fatigue syndrome is unknown.
2 August 2012 Last updated at 02:57
Fatigued woman

Exercise and behavioural therapies are the most cost-effective and successful ways to treat Chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as ME, an analysis shows.

A study of 640 patients showed these treatments had the potential to save the economy millions of pounds if they were widely adopted.

The findings were published in the journal PLoS ONE.

However, another treatment favoured by patients’ groups was shown to offer little value.

Nobody knows what causes the condition, yet a quarter of a million people in the UK are thought to have it.