Austria: Dr Michael Stingl

[Yann04]

Moved post
Not much information online but apparently Michael (Austrian neurologist who has been at the forefront of ME/CFS advocacy in Austria) published a book about ME. He says it doesn’t replace medical care and hopes it is helpful for those for whom the diagnosis is still unclear.

Kraftweg

Es beginnt mit einer leichten Viruserkrankung und endet in Konzentrationsproblemen, körperlichen Schmerzen, in extremen Fällen gar in völliger…

www.edition-a.at

 

[Utsikt]

Following posts moved from the Austria and Switzerland News thread, first post refers to an Austrian ME/CFS roundtable for physicians and selected researchers

The event was initiated by Christoph Ströck and Dr. Michael Stingl

His website is full of folk lore. Autoimmunity, viral persistence, mitochondria, hormones, MCAS, hEDS, CCI, supplements, LDN, LDA, spine imaging for diagnostics, autoimmunity panels.

 

[Chandelier]

His website is full of folk lore. Autoimmunity, viral persistence, mitochondria, hormones, MCAS, hEDS, CCI, supplements, LDN, LDA, spine imaging for diagnostics, autoimmunity panels.

He is very active on social media.
Here’s a good recent Bluesky post by him:
Machine translation:

I still haven’t understood how a diagnostic approach—the clinical diagnosis—that is considered normal for one disease is supposed to prevent a diagnosis from being made in another.

This becomes problematic in medical assessments.

#MECFS is, by definition, a clinical diagnosis. There is no biomarker (yet). If “objectification” is required here, those affected have no chance, because this cannot be achieved with the current state of knowledge.

2/n

Nevertheless, ME/CFS can be actively diagnosed: through taking a medical history, assessing the diagnostic criteria, appropriate differential diagnosis, and monitoring the course of the illness.

3/n

This makes it all the more important that, even in the snapshot represented by a medical assessment, at least a proper history specifically addressing ME/CFS is taken.

Not to mention the need to appropriately consider previous medical findings that document the course of the illness.

4/n

And unfortunately, in order to assess the validity of patients’ accounts, you need knowledge of and experience with caring for people with the disease.

With ME/CFS, this is unfortunately usually lacking because there are shortcomings in medical education and training.

He was a co-author of the consensus paper of Gernan speaking countries:
Interdisciplinary, collaborative D-A-CH consensus statement concerning the diagnostic and treatment of ME/CFS, 2024, Hoffmann et al [German]

 

[Silip]

His website is full of folk lore. Autoimmunity, viral persistence, mitochondria, hormones, MCAS, hEDS, CCI, supplements, LDN, LDA, spine imaging for diagnostics, autoimmunity panels.

The website description of underlying causes for ME does seem somewhat weird to me too, especially because when I read his posts on X or elsewhere and listen to his interviews I got the impression he had a more scientific approach when talking about ME there and is quite sceptical of many treatments and theories (except maybe for LDN and LDA where I know he prescribes those often).

That said, Stingl has a lot of credit with me (and many other patients in German speaking countries) because he really knows about the situation ME patients are in. The poor state of healthcare, lack of treatment options, battles with medical examiners and disability benefits, right down to the pathologization and the BPS nonsense that patients have had to endure over the past 20–30 years. He is also quite vocal about this in Austrian Media, does further training for Drs and tries to get neurology more involved in ME-treatment. I can only wish we had a Neurologist as publicly vocal as him in Switzerland.

 

[Yann04]

His website is full of folk lore. Autoimmunity, viral persistence, mitochondria, hormones, MCAS, hEDS, CCI, supplements, LDN, LDA, spine imaging for diagnostics, autoimmunity panels.

Yeah he’s a bit of a scheibenbogen, in the sense of absolutely invaluable and excellent advocacy, a major figure behind pushing the overton window both in politics and medicine to take pwME more seriously. But also very embedded in the biobabble.