Public Health/Cost of ME misdiagnosed as psychosomatic and other diseases

Historically, we have seen several diseases maligned as psychosomatic, with devastating costs to individuals: MS, Parkinson's, epilepsy, TB, stomach ulcers, asthma, and ME, as well as very likely many others.

Have public health authorities paid any attention to the overall economic costs and long term impacts of allowing poor research design, flawed perceptions and beliefs, weak or corrupt research, and reporting to guide fields of study for these and other diseases?

The psychosomatic view has cost society a great deal in many areas. Not only the economic costs, but the loss of human potential, productivity etc. Just in dollar terms the 2015 Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Medicine reported, " The total economic costs of ME/CFS are estimated at $17 to $24 billion annually." The National ME/FM Action Network's 2015 figures noted a yearly loss of $15 billion in productivity for the combined 800,000 Canadians with ME, and or Fibromyalgia.

In the past and today, flawed research based on erroneous perceptions of disease guides massive waste. Public health authorities should be scrutinizing these costs, and how they came about. Follow the trail from misguided theory/bias, to poor research, to incorrect treatment/no treatment, job loss, generalized health care costs etc.

 

Well if ME research had got going in the 60s there might have been a treatment by 1984 when I first got severe disablement allowance. I could have been paying 34 years of taxes instead of being given money every week.