rvallee
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
That seems expected. The acute illness caused by each virus is slightly different, it's only natural that the chronic illness will have differences. It's the same fundamental problem with differentiating COVID from other respiratory viruses: they look so much the same. The commonalities and impact on patients is still what should count above all else.I partly agree, but there has been some separation. For instance, Q-fever fatigue syndrome has tended to be separated out. I recall the comment made by an (off-screen) doctor during the 2019 Emerge conference that QFS and CFS were definitely different because the people who get QFS are quite different to the people who get CFS (i.e. presumably, in his mind, more male, rural, phlegmatic).
Possibly even post-Ciguatera fatigue will eventually be seen as part of ME/CFS. It's difficult to know exactly what should and shouldn't go together when we don't know the causes.
But one thing that is clear is that even suffering a few weeks of prolonged illness from a virus is not something that medicine accepts and here, again, it is causing unnecessary distress and confusion, impairing progress and causing harm. These patients are facing the same grotesque denial of care, being insulted on top of their illness, and for the exact same reasons that we are. The reasons cannot be separated here, these people are suffering precisely for the same reasons we are: denial of a clear medical problem that medicine refuses to consider a problem worth solving. It's a "you" problem, not a medical problem. On all counts it is morally and intellectually wrong.
Even if it only means correcting this we will make progress. No one should have to suffer the tyranny of being ill only to be told by medicine to go away, even be insulted in the process. Not for decades of illness anymore than for weeks of illness. Even if the disease is not identical, the underlying problem is one and the same, and so is the solution.