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I often have dry eyes but it's not something I bring up because it's not that important. I have many such minor symptoms, and if I were to mention them all, I would risk being labelled as psychosomatic case.

Background and Aim The clinical association between dry eye syndrome (DES) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) remain unclear with less evidences. We aimed to investigate the relationship between CFS and DES using a national insurance and prospective cohort study. Methods Data from the...

I haven't watched this but it sounds like it may have done more harm than good. It would have been better if it didn't concentrate on personal lives and treatment attempts so much and focused more on research and attempts to improve the political situation.

The author thinks that getting patients to recall different things may lead to a clinical benefit. I am now doubting the author's sanity. They seem to have discovered that patients have symptoms, unlike healthy people. I doubt that these results will advance our knowledge. OD = orthostatic...

I looked at the ones where CFS was mentioned. Was not impressed.

I imagine it's a bit like going to the restaurant and having a meal that isn't bad but also not good. The waiter might ask out politeness if the meal was good, and you probably respond out of politeness that it was. The patients can be "satisfied" because they felt that effort was made to help...

Wessely says that articles in the press endorse a medical model of CFS and reinforce stigma about psychological illness. In my view the BPS model is intrinsically stigmatizing and much of the stigma, at least in medical circles, originates there or from similar ideas about psychogenic illness...

A pathetic collection of make-believe articles whose only purpose is to ensure employment for incompetents that couldn't make it in real medicine.

High healtcare utilization is due to lack of effective treatment.

This study is nonsense. Patients that agreed with the statement that "exercise brings on my fatigue" on the fatigue severity scale were considered to suffer from PEM. The problem is with the study, not the IOM case definition. Nowhere does the IOM report suggest that this is an appropriate way...

Horrible.

These treatments were recommended because a group of British psychiatrists promoted them and produced research that appeared to confirm their efficacy. This started in 1989, well before the Fukuda criteria were created.

I looked at one of the questionnaires they used, the SCL-90-R which gives scores in categories such as "somatisation", "anxiety", "obsessive-compulsive" and so on. If you report symptoms such as headache, weakness, restlessness, dizziness, decreased sexual desire, chest pain, etc this counts...

This seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Re. the Wessely quote above. Typical for the BPS people, they do not understand human behaviour: the way patients behave is simply a reaction to the circumstances, which are unusual and therefore patient behaviour will also be unusual. Other illnesses don't meet such neglect and condescending...

Jason did poor work criticizing the IOM criteria. He used vague definitions of PEM and then finds that lots of other illnesses have PEM too. I am not sure asking patients about fatigue after exercise or activities tells us much about PEM. That said, we don't have a good questionnaire to...

At first I believed I was ill, but then was told it was a personality problem, and so I tried to believe that instead (I was just an innocent child), and it only made me feel bad about myself and made me sicker as I continuously tried to resume the old activity levels. I fervently believed I...

Science journals are really good at saying all the right things, but not nearly as good at actually implementing them.

It clearly illustrates that students are taught a logical fallacy: "If the problem cannot be identified, it means that it's some variant of psychogenic illness." This is the polite version of what I wanted to say. The original version included the term mass delusion.

Speaking of prejudices. Their illness model is simply a rephrasing of the usual prejudices patients face: laziness becomes deconditioning, and hypochondria becomes unhelpful illness beliefs.