BUPA (British United Provident Association): What is chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)?

author
Dr Luke Powles
Associate Clinical Director, Health Clinics Bupa Global and UK
20 July 2023
Next review due July 2026

Overall not too bad but having said it's not just feeling tired he continues using 'tiredness' (probably because that's what the NHS says). Good tho that he says it's not caused by emotional stress.
PEM not mentioned.

 

My "extreme tiredness" occurs before activity too. It's there before sleep and after sleep, and before activity and after activity. The only way it changes is if something in my ME changes.

 

Typo aside, those are very different things. Coping is not treating, and pacing is coping in the same way as not buying stuff is coping with poverty. It obviously doesn't treat it. No sane person would ever argue that. And yet here we still are, otherwise smart professionals essentially saying that.

This isn't all bad, but it's still failure to remain this ignorant and be unable to process and pay attention to details. I'm completely sick of the endless excuses MDs use to justify it. Every other profession manages to do better, there is no excuse to remain unable to pay attention to basic details, such as pretending that the CBT typically recommended for ME has been the denying/gaslighting type, with the very explicit goal of denying its reality.

There is simply no reason at all for CBT to be relevant here. There are no thoughts and behaviors to challenge, simply supporting people struggling with a terrible situation is what's needed, but of course it gets very awkward considering that medicine is entirely responsible for most of that hardship, has done massive deliberate harm.

Again, professionals are supposed to do better than this. This deserves a grade of C-. C- grade is a passing grade, but for a profession that requires A students, this is not nearly good enough.

Small progress, yay, but still, professionals everywhere do better than this, only in medicine is there this endless stream of excuses not to do their job competently.

 

PEM??