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My take on this. It is probably heterogeneous but I suspect not as much as some people think. The reason for the perception of CFS being very heterogeneous are the older Fukuda criteria and the Oxford criteria. The biphasic onset peaks in that one scandinavian study don't look like a diagnostic...

Since nobody is a perfectly average person without any life stressors it is always possible to create a narrative of this or that character flaw or event or behaviour causing psychogenic illness. Or just claim that the effects of the illness are actually its cause (like they do in IBS where they...

As one would expect to occur merely due to differences in the severity of the health problem(s) faced by the patients. A person with mild problems is going to perceive them as such, have less problems accepting the illness, and will be less ill (ie. able to do more of the activities that...

When a person thinks they have special insight that others lack that allows them to know about invisible and unobservable causes of disease they are probably considered eccentric and a little stupid, in the worst cases maybe even psychotic. Except when it's a very popular delusional belief like...

Is this venture capitalist unable to assess claims of treatment efficacy and a little gullible or does he not care whether it really works or not?

Since reading the post saying to avoid touching our faces and thinking "why not", I have touched my face several times. Oh well, at least ME means pretty much self isolating anyway, and apparently a hypervigilant immune system that will probably kill this virus dead right away.

There appears to be a push to legitimize this pseudoscientific idea. Pseudoscientific because they are claiming to know that something causes disease without there being any way to show that this something is present or absent in any person and corelates with the disease it is claimed to cause...

This is maybe relevant https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/work-as-an-expert

I am not sure you are following my line of though. I am certain the EU will have some sort of advisor or grant application reviewer that will be asked to give their opinion on how to spend the money or which projects to fund. Nobody is going to hand out large amounts of money without safeguards...

Something else is that maybe the anecdotal positive effect of magnesium is related to improved brain blood flow.

Very nice. Just the other day I was thinking that maybe the best treatment approach that we have at the moment would be to try and get blood flow working better. Other treatment directions are very speculative, but this one not as much. I also suspect some genes related to orthostatic...

It doesn't, but it means more jobs for CBT therapists. And by I mean it doesn't, I mean there's no credible evidence any treatment to be found in the psychological direction is more than a pleasing sham therapy.

You appear to be saying that that maybe there is some psychotherapy, done the right way, that works. I on the other hand think that the fact rubbish is the best anyone could come up with in 30 years shows that this direction of research is a dead end. There also doesn't seem much wisdom in the...

I think the counterargument for your proposed theoretical role of psychological processes is precisely the lack of effect of psychological therapies (as well as a whole lot of experience of actually having the illness and seeing how and in response to what it changes or doesn't change). If...

To put this into perspective, this is (I strongly suspect) psychologists explaining a controversy to the public that involves disagreement between psychologists and patients. Even with the best of intentions this likely to be problematic.

In multiple sclerosis what I would call disease process is the brain lesions and demyelinization. Which also have their own upstream causes which haven't been found so far. Even if the exact chain of causation is unclear, it is conceptually easy to differentiate between illness as set of...

Psychologists seem to think of illness as a set of symptoms (that includes mental ones). I and presumably other patients think of illness as disease process, or perhaps one could say, cause of symptoms. So when a patient says that ME is not mental illness they just mean it's not being caused by...

I don't like this article. It says that thinking of ME as purely a somatic illness is an extreme position. I think of it like that and I don't like being labelled an extremist, especially not by actual extremists. One can tell this was written by psychologists or at least from their point of...

I think proposing a respected scientific advisor would demonstrate competence by the involved advocates.

Biomedical orientation is no guarantee for quality or relevance. For example, in one occasion, when pressed about the need for research into ME/CFS, the EU responded by citing some research into probiotics as being ME/CFS research. There are a lot of misconceptions about ME/CFS and having at...