Chronic fatigue syndrome The Lancet

Well worth reading for up to date fact and opinions - especially the comments by Douglas Fraser

The Lancet: "Summary
During the past two decades, there has been heated debate about chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) among researchers, practitioners, and patients. Few illnesses have been discussed so extensively. The existence of the disorder has been questioned, its underlying pathophysiology debated, and an effective treatment opposed; patients' organisations have participated in scientific discussions. In this review, we look back on several controversies over CFS with respect to its definition, diagnosis, pathophysiology, and treatment. We review issues of epidemiology and clinical manifestations, focusing on the scientific status of CFS. Modern neuroscience and genetics research offer interesting findings for new hypotheses on the aetiology and pathogenesis of the illness. We also discuss promising future issues, such as psychopathophysiology and mechanisms of improvement, and suggest multidisciplinary prospective studies of CFS and fatigue in the general population."

"It is time therefore, to reject the misleading biopsychosocial CBT-associated "illness model", with it's barely concealed misanthropic,moralising overtones, and to remind those who seek to interfere with theirfellow human being's "ideas", "cognitions", "beliefs", to "educate" doctors,to alter the "patient's environment", to isolate people from their normalsupport frameworks, to manipulate those frameworks whilst insinuating impure motives in those affected by ME/CFS, that no matter how subtlety presented,these are coercive techniques as old as humanity itself, and none too
dissimilar from the "scientifically therapeutic" techniques of "re-education" or "thought reform" that the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton identified and delineated in the context of dissidence within Communist China, consisting of (eight) rather uncomfortably similar psychological themes which in combination "create an atmosphere which may temporarily
energize or exhilarate, but which at the same time poses the gravest of human threats" (3)."