Beth Dobbin: Tokyo Olympian Now Bedbound with ME — SkimNews
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- Beth Dobbin represented Great Britain at the Tokyo Olympics five years ago; she is now 32, has been diagnosed with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), and spends more than 22 hours a day in bed, leaving the house only five times this year
- Dobbin's illness began after back-to-back Covid and glandular fever infections in winter 2021-22; she still competed at that year's Worlds, Commonwealths, and Europeans, where she false-started after losing all feeling in her legs
- ME has no known cure, can cause more than 200 symptoms, and is thought to affect more than 400,000 people in the UK — a figure that could exceed one million — yet there is no specialist NHS service for the condition
- Dobbin waited 22 months for a face-to-face appointment with a private specialist she sourced herself after her British Athletics funding ended, and now finds herself educating GPs about the disease
- Dobbin rejects the label "chronic fatigue syndrome," saying fatigue "wouldn't make my top 20 symptoms" and that her body feels like "it's shutting down; you are a few days from death"
- Beth's sister Faye is running Sunday's Yorkshire Marathon to raise money for ME Research UK, while their father Jim — a former footballer for Barnsley, Grimsby and Doncaster Rovers — says the family has "nowhere to go" for treatment
Why it matters: Dobbin's case lays bare the institutional gap behind ME: no cure, no NHS specialist service, and a 22-month wait before she could see a private doctor she found herself. More than 400,000 UK patients may share her experience, and the post-Covid overlap with long Covid has finally drawn research funding — but Dobbin says it hasn't yet translated into treatment options for her or her family.
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