Rowe told me he is concerned that the health care workers who will be involved in the long-haulers’ rehabilitations won’t know what ME/CFS specialists have learned. He frets that physicians aren’t aware, for example, that too much physical exertion can drastically worsen symptoms. And he worries about the historical tendency to see the condition as psychological in nature.
That thinking led to an overemphasis on treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy or graded exercise therapy, he says, which have largely been abandoned as cure-alls for ME/CFS in the United States, but not without first doing great harm to patients. “It’s going to be extremely important not to make the mistakes that were made in the early ’90s,” he said at the meeting. As he put it to me: “I’m concerned that people haven’t learned the lessons of the past 25 years.”
.
)
