in dire need of updating. Judging by the editing history, a lot of the misinfo comes from the Mayo clinic. most recently updated in Aug 19, 2021 https://www.britannica.com/science/chronic-fatigue-syndrome
Although the history says they updated link to Mayo I can't find it and all the above info is the same even tho the site has been updated this month. So I've no idea where they got their info from now. There is a 'feedback' button if anyone wants to comment/ ask. https://www.britannica.com/science/chronic-fatigue-syndrome
The article has been updated. There is still bad info on exercise therapy etc. They have changed the name to ME/CFS though.
There is still total confusion between the epidemics of 'ME' and ME/CFS, which is something quite different. More and more I see how much this false narrative spreads everywhere. It is extraordinary that ME/CFS should be a condition about which there is so little accepted medical consensus that Britannica can produce such a garbled and misleading entry.
I hadn't realised that! I'd thought that the epidemics of ME were simply when some bug was prevalent enough to cause mass ME, just as Covid is doing. Is it generally accepted in the ME world now that these are different things? Would you like to expand on this a bit?
What I mean is that when people are describing what we now call ME/CFS they muddle in features of the acute illness that precipitated ME/CFS later in people at the Royal Free. I think the idea that 'ME is a neurological disease' is based on that muddle. It was the acute illness that gave rise to the term ME, not the later problems that Ramsay took an interest in.
Probably a fringe opinion, it's nothing as convoluted for the most part. From how the patient community talks about it, it's because it features a lot of neurological symptoms. As in about 99%+ of comments don't make any reference to historical artifacts, or the WHO categorization, and rely strictly on the fact that the symptoms cannot be mistaken for anything other than neurological. The same whether it's Long Covid, LC-flavored ME/CFS, or ME/CFS. Which makes a lot of sense. Is an illness with lots of neurological symptoms a neurological illness? Sounds logical to me. Or should it rather be described as an illness with neurological symptoms? Hence the common framing of a multisystemic illness. Still the idea is about as simple as people working out that respiratory symptoms probably indicate a respiratory illness and should probably be called a respiratory illness. But there's also things like COVID, which is a respiratory illness, and causes a lot of acute symptoms that aren't respiratory, such as loss of smell and so on. Neurology does seem to work on the basis that neurological illnesses/diseases can only have neurological symptoms, so that's a bit of a bind but it does not change the facts and that this is a rational perspective.
Yes but that example shows why your argument doesn't really work. The reality is that the idea that ME is a neurological disease has been picked up by patients from medical gurus who point out it was classified like that fifty years ago. Diseases with respiratory symptoms are often not respiratory diseases. The main symptom of left ventricular heart failure is breathlessness, which is also common in severe renal failure. Pain on breathing may indicate a pathological rib fracture from myeloma. And so on. I am not aware of any symptoms of ME/CFS that are neurological in the sense that they point specifically to a lesion in the nervous system. What would they be? Not fatigue, OI, nausea, gut problems, muscle pain.... Maybe sound and light sensitivity but you can get those with flu - is flu a neurological disease? No.
Entry was updated on March 15, 2025: https://www.britannica.com/science/myalgic-encephalomyelitis-chronic-fatigue-syndrome
Where did this criteria come from? Looking at OMF's chart of different criteria, the only one that requires four symptoms from a list is Fukuda. But the bolded symptoms above aren't in Fukuda's list. And the listed criteria is missing PEM. More importantly, the whole page is missing any mention of PEM.
