Disentangling fatigue from anhedonia: a scoping review, 2020, Billones et al

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What I have never understood is why people insist in describing fatigue as merely a set of subjective experiences without any relation to, or association with, the accompanying reduction of physical or mental capacity. They may say that these are not measurable, but they are observable. People may, of course, feign such symptoms. But then, people may feign their scientific credentials.

If I ignore "fatigue" I end up unable to put one foot in front of the other. Is that a merely subjective experience?

 

To me seems to be evidence saying that diagnoses based on vague subjective feelings are very unreliable.

 

First of all: the similarities are trivial and superficial and only hard to differentiate for non-professionals. It is definitely true that to the untrained eye it is not easy but it takes especially incompetent people to be trained and still fail at it. The same way different flowers of the same family are hard to differentiate if you know nothing about botany, but generally easy for anyone with minimal training. So this whole controversy is frankly silly at this point, they are different concepts that mean different things and should only be truly hard to differentiate for complete amateurs.

But this:

No. Just no. Following this logic, people could simply do an infinite number of repetitions while lifting weights, where the fatigue that comes from expending energy is simply a matter of perception and in reality as long as one can do 10 repetitions of a certain mass they should be able to do an infinite number. The limit on being able to do more has nothing to do with a subjective sense, it is a physical limit. Just stop with this nonsense. You can't redefine concepts to fit your worldview, at least not without disastrous consequences.

This is far too simplistic. No one who is currently in significant pain is able to experience pleasure normally. There will usually be a valid reason, just because that reason cannot be observed means it does not exist, object permanence is not an optional concept in science. People with severe food poisoning trying to keep from projectile vomiting are also in a very reduced state of being able to experience pleasure. Context matters. I don't understand why medicine is so damn dogmatic about ignoring all context, as if external events played no role whatsoever and everything has to be reduced to a bundle of caricatural explosion of immature emotions.

Medicine is carrying far too much dead weight, people who contribute negatively to the whole and basically act as saboteurs, unwilling and unwitting but effective at it nonetheless. This confusion exists only because some people in medicine are unable to do their job and choose instead to argue their own personal opinion. By this standard the HIV model of AIDS is controversial simply because some people think it is. No. There is such a thing as an invalid opinion in science and evidence matters.

Words have meaning. Use that meaning. Define that meaning and stop freaking repurposing words to mean different things out of some desperate need to do terrible philosophy with practical matters just to stroke your massive egos.