Chemical Sensitivities are Listed in the NICE Guidelines

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care. The guidance is expected to be taken into full consideration by healthcare professionals and organisations when deciding on treatments for patients. However, it is not designed to replace the knowledge and skills of individual health professionals. The guidance below is in the FULL document, not the summary/Quick Reference Guide. Since the full document is over 300 pages, your doctor is NOT likely to have read the full document and it may be helpful for you to reference it. It may also be useful for benefit applications when sensitivities can be listed as a symptom of ME/CFS. As the documents are so big we can’t provide printed copies but you can download both the full document and summary here:

? NICE CFS/ME summary guidelines (no reference to chemical sensitivities): http://tinyurl.com/nvemsn7
? NICE CFS/ME guidelines FULL DOCUMENT: http://tinyurl.com/o372j9k
Online: the guidance document can also be accessed directly at the website of the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence: http://www.nice.org.uk
? Choose ‘ find guidance’ from the home page.
? Select ‘Central Nervous System’ from the conditions & diseases list
? If you then choose ‘sort alphabetically’ then the relevant guidance is easy to locate – it comes up as the 1st item listed on the second page
? Choose ‘FULL GUIDANCE’ (from the options at right hand side)
? The relevant section is part of Chapter 7 ‘People with severe CFS/ME’, search for “7.4.1”

Caution! NICE summary guidance for ME/CFS also states:
“Cognitive behavioural therapy and/or graded exercise therapy should be offered to people with mild or moderate CFS/ME and provided to those who choose these approaches, because currently these are the interventions for which there is the clearest research evidence of benefit.”
But also:
“Healthcare professionals should be aware that – like all people receiving care in the NHS – people with CFS/ME have the right to refuse or withdraw from any component of their care plan without this affecting other aspects of their care, or future choices about care.”