By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Michael Fitzpatrick wrote an excellent article For Spiked Online in January of attempts in the United Kingdom to transform Chronic Fatigue Syndrome into a bonafide disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).

Fitzpatrick is a general practitioner who occasionally treats people suffering from CFS in his practice. Fitzpatrick does not so much doubt that CFS is a real disorder, but rather believes that it is best treated on what he calls a biopsychosocial model which "suggests that once an illness has started, its expression is affected by beliefs, coping styles, and behaviors, while consequential physiological and psychological effects act in some way to maintain and/or modify the disease process."

Many people dislike this, however, because they incorrectly believe that this means that CFS patients are just faking an illness. So a recent report by the CFS/ME Working Group instead adopted the biomedical model and bizarrely labeled ME, "a conditional like many other medical conditions where illness results from a specific pathological defect in physiological functioning, mediated at organ, tissue, cellular and/or molecular level, by as yet undefined mechanisms" (emphasis added).

Even more odd is that the report conceded that there is no reliable way to diagnose people with ME. Fitzpatrick relegates this point to a footnote, but it is worth pondering for a moment to get the full effect. Fitzpatrick writes,

While insisting on the crucial importance of an "early authoritative and positive" diagnosis on page 35, on page 36 the report admits that "current diagnostic criteria are useful only for research purposes, and no clinically recognized set of diagnostic criteria exists."

Got that? No one knows how to diagnose ME or explain exactly what causes it but, damn it, it's a real disease anyway! It was that sort of language that caused 10 of the original members of the group writing that report to resign before the report was published.

Someday this will make a fascinating study about the extent to which illness is socially defined. For the meantime, lets hope this quackery stays on the other side of the Atlantic.

Source:

Debating the disease. Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked-Online.Com, February 14, 2002.

ME: the making of a new disease. Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked-Online.Com, January 17, 2002.

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