Dr Speight's 5 free Irish ME/CFS talks in Cork/Dublin/Galway/Limerick/Sligo, May 2024. Plus he is seeing patients aged 20 or younger for free while he is in Ireland.
Dr Speight's 5 free Irish
ME/CFS talks in Cork/Dublin/Galway/Limerick/Sligo, May 2024. Plus he is seeing
patients aged 20 or younger for free while he is in Ireland.
The Irish ME/CFS Association is pleased to announce that it has arranged
for Dr Nigel Speight, a leading international
ME/CFS expert from the UK, to give 5 ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome talks in
Ireland in and around international ME/CFS Awareness Day, May 12 May. The talks
will include questions-and-answers sessions.
Each talk will be followed by a chance to chat to others over complimentary
tea/coffee/herbal tea/water and biscuits.
Note that Dr Speight has kindly offered to see patients who are 20 years old or younger with ME/CFS or suspected ME/CFS for free while he is spending time in the 5 locations (more details below)
Towards the
end, we have included a biography of Dr Speight.
The talks will take place in the following venues:
- Dublin
Tuesday May 7 2024 - 7:30 PM
Carlton Hotel Dublin Airport
Old Airport
Road, Cloghran, Dublin, K67P5C7
https://www.carltondublinairport.com/
Car
parking: Complimentary for all the attendees (need to stop at reception on
departure to validate ticket)
Location
info: https://www.carltondublinairport.com/locations.html
24-hour
Complimentary Shuttle Bus Service to & from Dublin Airport (useful as there
are a lot of transport links to the airport)
This talk is being hosted by Vera Kindlon, the Association’s chairperson.
- Sligo: Thursday May 9: 7:30 PM Glasshouse Hotel, The Glasshouse, Swan Point, Sligo, F91 NCA4 https://www.theglasshouse.ie . Telephone: (071) 919 4300. According to the website there is "ample car parking for delegates". Location: https://www.theglasshouse.ie/location.html GPS Co-ordinates +54° 16' 21.69" -8° 28' 30.42" This is being hosted by Ruth Flood.
- Galway
Saturday May 11 - 2:30 PM
Maldron Hotel Sandy Road, Headford Point, Sandy Road, Galway H91 ET6N
(Not to be confused with the Maldron Oranmore)
https://www.maldronhotelsandyroadgalway.com/
Free parking for attendees
Location: https://www.maldronhotelsandyroadgalway.com/location/
Take the exit for Liosban Industrial Estate at the N6/N84 junction (some of the
road marking have it written as L'ban on the lane you go into), and then a
right turn into the hotel car park.
This talk is being hosted by Orla Ní Chomhraí, secretary of the Irish ME/CFS
Association and coordinator of the Galway ME/CFS Support Group.
- Limerick
Monday May 13 2024 - midday
Great National South Court Hotel, Raheen Gardens, Raheen, Limerick, V94 E77X
https://www.southcourthotel.com/
Free parking available for up to 400 vehicles
Location: see here https://www.southcourthotel.com/location/
This talk is being hosted by Sarah Warde, co-ordinator of the Limerick ME
Self-Help Group.
- Cork
Wednesday May 15 2024 - 7:30 PM
The Kingsley Hotel, Victoria Cross, Cork, T12 P680.
https://www.thekingsley.ie/location/
Lots of free car parking
Location: see here: https://www.thekingsley.ie/location/
This talk is being hosted by Michelle Dinn, coordinator of the Cork ME/CFS
Support Group, and Ashling O’Leary.
Admission: Free. We don’t take pre-bookings but we expect the rooms will
be big enough to hold the numbers we expect to attend.
Mask wearing is encouraged for the talk and question-and-answer session of the
event. After that, when the tea/coffee/herbal tea/water and biscuits are
served, many if not most people probably won’t be wearing masks (so some people
may choose to leave before that).
If you would like further information and/or be kept up-to-date with future
events, please contact us at info@irishmecfs.org or our voicemail 01-235 0965.
Seeing Dr Speight as a patient:
Dr Speight has kindly offered to see patients who are 20 years old or younger with ME/CFS or suspected ME/CFS for free while he is spending time in the 5 locations. People should email Dr Speight at speight@doctors.org.uk if interested in this opportunity. This email should not be used for general enquiries about the illness. Note that the Irish ME/CFS Association is not involved in organising Dr Speight seeing patients so should not be contacted with enquiries about the appointments.
Biography (as it relates to ME/CFS):
I am Dr. Nigel Speight, a consultant paediatrician formerly at the University Hospital of North Durham. My qualifications are MA, MB, BChir, FRCP, FRCPCH, DCH. I have 40 years of experience in paediatrics, 25 as a consultant. I retired from my post in Durham in 2007 but continue to practice as a consultant locum and remain on the medical register.
Over the last 30years I have developed an extensive experience and interest in the area of ME/CFS [Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome] in childhood and adolescents. Within North Durham alone I accumulated over 200 cases under my personal care. In addition, because of my special interest, I have had over 1000 cases referred to me from elsewhere in the Northern Region and all over the United Kingdom. These referrals have been from general practitioners and fellow paediatricians. The G.P. referrals have tended to be because the local paediatricians had shown a reluctance to diagnose ME and the family were dissatisfied at the uncertainty. The Northern paediatricians have often referred for confirmation of the diagnosis and advice on management. The distant paediatricians have usually referred because the cases were of a severity they had never witnessed before. In this context I have travelled to Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Inverness, South Wales, Buckinghamshire, Manchester and Essex.
With the retirement of the late Dr Alan Franklin I became the paediatrician with probably the greatest accumulated clinical experience of this condition in the UK.
I have performed research on this area, reporting a 6-10 year follow-up survey of 49 of my Durham cases. I presented this paper at our College’s AGM in York in 2003. This is the first study of its kind in this country but very similar findings have been recently reported in the USA and Australia.
I have helped to support over 200 families of children with ME who were threatened with Child Protection proceedings because of the failure of their local doctors to make a firm diagnosis of ME. Many of these parents were falsely accused of Fabricated and Induced Illness (FII). I have given evidence for court proceedings not only in this country but also in Norway, Denmark and Germany, and am currently involved in a similar case in France.
I have given invited lectures on paediatric ME to a national paediatric conference in Cambridge, to paediatricians in the North East, and to trainee paediatricians in the North East. In 1994 I gave an invited lecture to the College of Paediatrics and Child Health on the subject. In 2000 I gave an invited lecture to a national conference in London (Fatigue 2000). In 2002 I was invited to Sydney, Australia to lecture on both my follow-up study and my experience of cases where young people with ME/CFS had been subjected to child protection proceedings by disbelieving professionals.
More recently, I gave an invited lecture to an international ME meeting in Oslo in 2011, followed by one in Stockholm in 2014. I have since given further invited lectures in Amsterdam and Reykjavik. More recently I gave an invited talk to the AGM of the Royal College of General Practitioners in Glasgow.
I am currently the paediatric adviser to the charities the TYMES Trust, ME Association (MEA), the 25% Group, BRAME (the Blue Ribbon Awareness of ME charity) and the Welsh ME Association. For many years I was also paediatric adviser to the Association of Young People with ME (AYME) and Action for ME.
For two years I was a paediatric member of the Working Party on ME/CFS set up by the Chief Medical Officer. This provided its final report in February 2002, and was a major milestone in the final acceptance of ME/CFS as an organic condition.
Subsequently I was a member of the Guidelines group on the management of ME/CFS for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH); the guidelines were published in January 2005. I co-authored the section on “Management of Severe ME” with Dr Harvey Marcovitch for these guidelines.
I have addressed the Gibson Enquiry (UK Parliamentary group on ME) and also the Scottish all-parliamentary group on ME on three occasions in recent years.
I am a contributing author to the International Consensus Criteria for ME, along with the associated International Consensus Primer on ME. More recently, I co-authored “Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Diagnosis and Management in Young People: A Primer” which was drawn up by another international panel of experts and published a review article on ME in the Saudi Arabian Medical Journal.
In addition I have a longstanding interest in the area of Child Abuse and Neglect, a subject on which I have performed research, written numerous articles, and lectured extensively to medical and multidisciplinary audiences. For 10 years I was the paediatric representative on the Durham Area Child Protection Committee. In 2001, I was a member of the committee of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health looking at the problem of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I also have a special interest in Psychological problems in paediatrics, having been Deputy Convenor and then Convenor of our College’s Psychiatry and Psychology Subgroup over a period of six years.
More recently I have published papers on “Severe ME in Children” and “Life-threatening malnutrition in severe ME” (the latter winning the Goudsmit prize awarded by the ME Association)
Most recently, in 2021 I attended the round table event hosted by NICE at which I represented the two charities the 25% group and TYMES Trust. This meeting was called to discuss the new guidelines with representatives of the Royal Colleges
Dr Nigel Speight
Durham
