Article Index

Medical refugees

Dr. Hyde drew a contrast and similarity between refugees and ME/CFS patients. He showed pictures of 2 women from Iran with similar names. The first one was killed and images uploaded to the internet. However, Iran went after the second woman, thinking they were one and the same and attempted to murder her. She was a university English professor, who was forced to flee for her life from Iran. She escaped from being killed, but wound up in a refugee camp in Germany and wrote “Every day in such a place is torture, not just for me but for all those refugees. Some had been there for 10 years. You give up on your own destiny. You have to submit to whatever the system decrees. In my society I had achieved so much and now I had nothing—I was in a drawer, a folder labeled 'refugee'." Her name is Neda Soltani. Dr. Hyde made the comparison of her plight and that with patients who feel pretty much the same way.