Medical students highlight the importance of medical education, kindness, compassion and belief when learning about [pwME/CFS], 2024, Muirhead

SNT Gatchaman

SNT Gatchaman

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Medical students highlight the importance of medical education, kindness, compassion and belief when learning about patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
Nina Louise Muirhead

‘Imagine my surprise to discover ME/CFS is definitely not rare, but inexplicably and infuriatingly unacknowledged’. Fifth year medical student, Scotland

Link | PDF (Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh) [Open Access]
 
The lack of medical education on this topic and resulting weak clinical knowledge of ME/CFS has resulted in delays to diagnosis, multiple clinic referrals and a huge cost to every taxpayer. ME/CFS costs the UK an estimated £3.3 billion a year 6 and long COVID clinics cost millions, with funding being extended for this chronic condition. Yet Scottish services are struggling to find healthcare practitioners to deliver this care or worse, offering potentially harmful patient support workshops that are directly in conflict with the NICE (NG206) 2021 ME/CFS guidelines such as the highly criticised ‘Lightning Process’.7 Medical education on ME/CFS and post-acute infectious disease is urgently needed for earlier recognition and better management.
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One student described the experience and delay in diagnosis for two of their family members: ‘. . .these young women were discarded as victims of teenage laziness or anxiety. They had to fight to gain support from their GP (General Practitioner) and their diagnosis took several second opinions and ultimately years’.
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Outdated treatment using graded exercise, shown to harm ME/CFS patients, has been rebranded as ‘activity management’ in some services and offered to both ME/CFS and long COVID patients. Another medical student displayed incredible insight in recognising the deficiency of the current system, which relies largely on patient self-help: ‘the burden being placed on the patient to improve their condition through mental work’.
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ME/CFS also has a major impact on family members’ quality of life. Nearly a third of medical students responding commented on the impact on quality of life as being one of the most important things to learn about this disease.
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Several students wrote about a family member, or friend, whom they knew with ME/CFS. Sadly, it was a recurring theme that the medical students explained they had not been taught about ME/CFS at medical school. One commented: ‘Alas, the only time in the last four years I have encountered the term ME/CFS at medical school was as a differential diagnosis for fibromyalgia’.
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‘Imagine my surprise to discover ME/CFS is definitely not rare, but inexplicably and infuriatingly unacknowledged’. Fifth year medical student, Scotland
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The current younger generation of medicos, those from 1st year med school through to approx. 10 years post-grad, really need to make the effort to get up to speed with what is going wrong in their profession over this stuff, because they are the generation who will have to be apologising for and cleaning up the appalling carnage left behind by their senior colleagues currently driving the show off the rails and keeping it there.

I doubt they will be too happy about spending a large chunk of their otherwise productive careers on having to do this.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Medical students highlight the importance of medical education, kindness, compassion and belief when learning about patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
Nina Louise Muirhead

‘Imagine my surprise to discover ME/CFS is definitely not rare, but inexplicably and infuriatingly unacknowledged’. Fifth year medical student, Scotland

Link | PDF (Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh) [Open Access]
Click to expand...

So sad. 35 years of medical education without any doctor with knowledge about ME/CFS. Even kindness, compassion and belief have yet to be taught.
 
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