Free State — ‘In recent American foreign policy, two principles loom large. In Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, we have argued that national self-determination brings justice and peace. In Afghanistan, we have insisted that democracies should give no quarter in the war against terrorism. Now, if India and Pakistan can ignore both those principles, they may be able to avert a war over Kashmir.’ The New Republic The author argues that India essentially faces a no-win situation in Kashmir because of historical accident and contemporary pressures.

‘X-Files’ To Be Permanently Sealed

According to the Hollywood Reporter online, the final episode of “The X-Files” will air in May. It will be the 201st show of the series, which began nine years ago.

“I’d rather go out now and celebrate rather than have to make an announcement in the summer,” show creator Chris Carter told the site. The Boston Channel

About time someone finally put the show out of its misery…

ME: the making of a new disease — British physician Michael Fitzpatrick, author of The Tyranny of Health: doctors and the regulation of lifestyle, writes here about myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is what the British call chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS. A working group reporting to the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, the equivalent of the Surgeon General of the US, has endorsed the idea that ME is a real disease and requires prompt recognition and attention. Like me, the essayist is skeptical, and notes that before reaching its consensus statement, the committee was riven by controversy and resignations. My close study of CFS as one of a number of controversial syndromes on the medical-psychiatric interface about which I have written and taught convinced me that, while there is an organic basis for CFS in a small proportion of cases, by and large the diagnosis is misused by self-deceiving sufferers and politically correct clinicians with the misguided notion that it is a stinging rejection to tell a patient that their dysfunction is “all in their head.” This is enabling to patients who are invested in finding a physical explanation for their psychological distress, often personality disorders that are hard to pin down.

The essay also underscores the medical perils of the essentially political nature of the recognition of new diagnoses. This is quite familiar to those of us in the mental health field who watch the squabbling around the periodic revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the official ‘bible’ of diagnoses in psychiatry. It should not be surprising in an era when there are pitched battles over paying for medical care. As Dr Fitzpatrick notes, it “represents the capitulation of medical authority to irrationality.”

‘Self-pity and self-deception are the great enemies of Mankind’ writes medical commentator Theodore Dalrymple in his recent book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine. Yet both are pervasive in modern society, and nowhere more than among patients with ME, above all in the ME organisations. To any observer who takes a historical or sociological perspective on the emergence of novel diseases such as CFS/ME, their origins in the existential distress of their sufferers is readily apparent – as indeed it usually is in the doctor’s surgery.

The tragedy of the sufferers is their lack of insight into this process, a deficit that is reinforced by the provision of a pseudo-medical disease label. Whereas according to the new policy of the Chief Medical Officer, doctors are now obliged to collude with the self-deception of ME sufferers, for Dalrymple, it is necessary to ‘undeceive’ to achieve change. From his humanistic perspective, it is the doctor’s responsibility, acting with due circumspection, to ‘undeceive the self-deceived’. While the official line ratifies confusion and promotes incapacity, this approach points the way towards enlightenment and recovery.spiked!

Robert Kuttner: Daschle Too Timid To Take On Bush Tax Cut:

“(W)hen Democrats try to blame Bush for this year’s escalating deficit, Republicans can easily demonstrate that most of the current fiscal deterioration is the result of the recession.

That, of course, misses the real point, which is that the big tax cut misallocates national resources for the long term. Worse, instead of making national priorities the issue, Democrats make deficits the issue.

The Democrats are also loath to draw the logical conclusion that most of the 10-year tax cut should be repealed. Bush has vowed that this would occur ”over my dead body,” a vow reminiscent of his fathers famous braggadocio (”Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the Democrats should take up Bush II’s challenge.” The American Prospect