Likewise, more criticism could have been made explicitly of the group of professionals who for so long have promoted a view that ME/CFS is not a “real” illness, but is simply due to a combination of faulty illness beliefs and deconditioning. The harm that these views have done and continue to do to the patient community is immense and one of the major medical scandals of the last 50-60 years.
This is fair and deserves its time in the spotlight, but it's important to take into account that for all their terrible, dishonorable, behavior and lies, pretty much any random group of MDs would have likely concluded the same. This isn't a failure of small group of people. It's a whole profession failure distributed across thousands of systems and institutions, all of which failed just as hard.
This is what we are seeing with Long Covid. Maybe it's a consequence of their work, but I doubt it. Most researchers and clinicians approaching this do not have in mind any of this history, most have never heard of ME/CFS. They are looking at the phenomenon, apply their medical training, and basically conclude the same things all on their own. After all, those conclusions literally require no skills, no training, no evidence of any kind. It's a simple popular logical fallacy, the most common error in medicine: if I don't know of it, it can't exist, all tests are normal.
So for sure they have done disastrous harm, but it was mostly through their very effective campaigns of vilification than their mediocre research. I don't think it would have mattered much either way in the end. Medicine has long been primed to swallow this nonsense and there isn't much that could have pulled things to any other outcome.
Not that it absolves them of any blame, but it's ultimately mostly irrelevant. The vast majority of clinicians and therapists who first saw LC patients, have been working with those, some for years now, having seen hundreds or even thousands, all failed the same way, for the same reasons. They can't see that what they're doing is useless, that there is no credible evidence for what they are doing, and if it hadn't been exercise rehabilitation with CBT, it probably have been some other set of useless rituals.
The greatest tragedy here is perhaps that they have been cruel jerks for no reason at all. They could have achieved the exact same outcomes without it. They did this because we pushed back. Perhaps the other lesson to take from this. How medicine is essentially incapable of self-correcting. We sure are seeing it happen in broad daylight and on a bigger stage than ever.
