If you demolish the unsound foundation stone myth that myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is the same as chronic fatigue syndrome, which is the keystone element of our forthcoming project Breaking The Mould project for ME Awareness Week (May 6-12), all the other dependent structures, such as confidently quoted statistics and recommended treatments, fall like a house of cards.

The term chronic fatigue syndrome (Highlighting Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, April 4), should not be used in the singular, since it is not a single illness.

There are at least seven different sets of criteria. Furthermore, patients formerly diagnosed with CFS have been subsequently correctly diagnosed with a huge range of illnesses.

It would be like trying to equate one of the contents of a group with the whole of its collective set, for example, that “apple” is just the same as “fruit” or that it is the only one subsumed under it, like, fruit/apple (ignoring all others, such as oranges, bananas etc.). If pursued, the results are inevitably invalid and unreliable. Furthermore, if the conclusions based on untrustworthy results are applied to people who were not represented in the study, they are likely to be ineffective and possibly harmful. For example, just as what may be suitable for the eating, packing, storing or processing of some fruit such as apples and oranges may not be for bananas and even inadvisable for mangoes, so it is that treatments urged on people with CFS may be potentially harmful for ME sufferers, who were, likewise, not included in the study.

Yet, this is the common practice in this field. A relatively small number of people, with a given or assumed reputation and the power to affect policy-making, talk of “this illness …” as though it is but one and advocate cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET), despite serious anecdotal and research evidence against it.

Their word is usually taken for it by primary care doctors, who presumably assume that their work is based on solid ground and they are not challenged by some peers who would rather not rock the establishment boat, or by patients who may be in awe, or fear, of them.

Since there is not much incentive for change from people who derive employment as researchers or therapists, or from their sponsors, if they have a profit motive in the direction of their findings and since it does not seem likely that they will voluntarily dissociate their preferred chronic fatigue syndrome from ME, we suggest that people affected by this awful illness join us in divorcing ourselves from this unwanted and abusive partner forced upon us in a shotgun wedding, almost a quarter of a century ago, and invest our energy and own clean, no-strings, money into Breaking The Mould, rather than watch the propaganda continue, allowing people to remain ill for decades and some of them to die before their time.