Rating 1/5
Review:
Injurious and toxic
The title should have warned me. The word "unmasked", of course, means
that only the author has the wit, insight and clinical acumen to show
the rest of the world what is *really* going on. The problem, he says,
is with the adrenal glands, which gradually cease to function under
accumulated stresses. That's it. All the probing and research and
uncertainty by excellent doctors all over the world is a waste of time.
It's the adrenals and nothing else. In our present state of knowledge,
nobody with this degree of certainty about the causes and nature of
CFS/ME is to be trusted.
It gets worse. Much worse, in fact. In
the chapter on Sex and the Adrenal Syndrome Patient the author asserts
that we obtain essential health-giving substances when we mix our sexual
fluids with those of someone of the opposite sex. However, if we are
not both married and in love when we have sex, then the compounds which
are "vital to the neuroglandular mechanisms" of our partner become
"injurious and toxic". (No details of the compounds concerned nor any
mechanism for this remarkable chemical transformation are given.)
Further, we cannot expect to benefit from sex outside marriage because
this is "breaking the Laws of Nature and of God, both of which will
punish any and all lawbreakers."
Whether or not one agrees with
it, the belief that sex should be confined to loving married couples is a
perfectly respectable and defensible moral stance. However, to dress it
up as science based upon wild assertion and threats of the wrath of God
is disgraceful. Then to link this to the ill-health of CFS/ME patients
is simply outrageous.
There is a deceptive and
borderline-dishonest use of references to attempt to lend respectability
to his argument. He argues, calmly and reasonably, against use of the
Pill and IUD for contraception because of possible harmful side-effects.
These are very well-known and no longer disputed by anyone, but
Poesnecker carefully cites no fewer than eight references on the
subject, listed, as is customary, in a References section at the back of
the book. One's eye runs down a list of papers from highly respected
medical journals: American Heart Journal, both the American and British
Journals of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and so on. Very impressive - and
utterly uncontentious. The next reference is cited after the following
sentence:
" It is a foregone conclusion among advanced
endocrinologists that various secretions of the human body can be
altered by the emotional status of the individual, and compounds which
under normal circumstances should be beneficial and sustaining can
become injurious and toxic if produced in an environment of disturbed
human emotion."
Now this is really controversial, not to say wacky.
We can look up the reference which Poesnecker cites to support it, which
immediately follows the list of prestigious papers on a peripheral
subject which no-one disputes. Amongst all of these, the reference
supporting the amazing statement above is not to the Journal of Advanced
Endocrinology, but to Reader's Digest of May 1972, for heaven's sake,
containing an article entitled Your Emotions Can Make You Ill by Blake
Clark. Very few readers, most of whom will be sufferers rather than
doctors, would bother to check this. At best, most of us glance in a
general way through lists of references, and would be impressed with all
of the solid medical papers cited. It's a very dodgy way of lending
spurious authority to a thoroughly unscientific idea.
One worries
that Poesnecker's Olympian self-certainty means that his diagnosis of
Adrenal Syndrome is based on the notion that it must be true, and
evidence to the contrary is to be ignored because it is just obscuring
the truth. Statements such as the one I have cited above (and plenty of
others in the book) are not science, they are articles of faith. Science
attempts to describe, explain and predict the world as it is, and
scientific ideas shape themselves according to the world we see.
Poesnecker, on the contrary, seems to be trying to adapt the world to
his ideas. People throughout history have tried this. None has yet
succeeded, although some medical practitioners have done a great deal of
harm to their patients in the attempt.
In fairness, the book
makes some reasonable points, such as the difficulty which the medical
establishment has had in coming to terms with CFS/ME, and the fact that
sufferers recover better if they have a good diet and are loved and
supported. It talks about allergies in a way which seems reasonable, at
least to a non-clinician, and adrenal problems are a factor in the
illness of some CFS/ME patients. However, all of this has been much
better dealt with by people like Anne Macintyre, and much of Chronic
Fatigue Unmasked is little short of ghastly. In my view, reading this
book would be terribly injurious and toxic to your neuroglandular
mechanisms, so don't.
