I allowed myself to be referred to and treated by the psychiatric lobby for three years, their diagnosis being post traumatic stress disorder, despite the absence of any specific trauma-worthy inducing factors in my life.

Consultations with psychiatrists turned regularly into discussions about my medication, usually SSRI's and the fact that they failed to address my symptoms at any dose, indeed often making me feel worse, in fact over-prescription causing seratonin syndrome at one stage.

Physiological symptoms were on the whole overlooked or interpreted as somatic manifestations of a psychiatric problem.

In utter frustration I eventually tracked down a professor who runs a ptsd clinic for Vietnam veterans, and after a six week appraisal period with him he came up with the opinion that I had been misdiagnosed, this was not ptsd, as he worked with it every day, and that my problem was physiological and probably neurological rather than the domain of psychology, there being no signs of psychiatric illness present.

So with three years wasted, and having been subjected to drugs which only seemed to inflame my condition I approached an ME/CFS specialist who tests and treats specific symptoms in line with clinical research findings that ME is a neurological disease.

After only a few months, various tests are proving typical ME abnormalities to be present in blood, neurological and endocrine systems, and have been given appropriate treatment.

Already we have mapped Insulin dysregulation; channelopathy problems; adrenal dysregulation; orthostatic intolerance; neurotransmitter dysfunction; and disregulated diurnal sleep patterns.

Bloods continue to show 5 times the normal levels of white cells, showing that the system is trying to fight off a pathogen, whilst a radioactive white cell scan showed no centre of infection, also red cells exhibit the typical clumping reported in clinical research, causing an extremely slow ESR, and blood too thick to negotiate the narrow capillaries of the innermost areas of the brain.

As a result of this scientifically based treatment I have improved dramatically, my most troubling symptoms are under control, and my physician is building up a picture of the systems which are not working in a balanced way.

I gave the psychiatric lobby the opportunity and co-operated for three years during which time I only got worse, and can only endorse from an experiential position the importance of scientific intervention by an informed physician, familiar with the idiosyncratic presentation of ME/CFS.

Dr Shepherd, in many ways the object of this post is to refute the efficacy of the psychiatric-based treatments which you and your co-horts endorse. Three years of CBT and monthly psychiatric consultation failed to address any of my symptoms at all whereas purely scientific medicine has in three months improved my functioning hugely.

My heart goes out to you all in the UK who are being prevented from accessing such vital yet simple intervention, and I support you in fighting the untruths and misinformation which prevents the severely ill from accessing appropriate treatment."