Remember that Dr. Lloyd is the creator of a large study that looked at what happened when people came down with four kinds of different infections. The focus was on whether the immune system acted differently or the pathogen was not eradicated in people who came down with ME/CFS vs the people who did not. That's the biggest project of his career. Does that sound like someone who thinks ME/CFS patients are simply somatizing?
I just looked at those guidelines from Australia in 2002. This is one thing they say.
They also say this
I see them saying that they simply don't know. They do cover immune, CNS and HPA axis studies. Dr. LLoyds emphasis has never been somatization; he's never done a study on that to my knowledge and he's done lots of immune and gene expression studies. Yes, he was funded by the CDC but that was determine the immune status of people who came down with an infectious illness. I think we can all probably agree that that was a good idea.
They're very conservative, they don't recommend many treatments and they do recommend CBT/GET but note that they say exercise 'without relapse'; ;these are not the hated GET program that pushes patients until they fall apart.
Dr. Lloyd is skeptical about many things in CFS research. He's kind of known for stepping in the middle of an exciting issue and saying this doesn't make sense. He believes, for instance, that gene expression is a waste (based on his results).
I trust him -he's not going to manipulate data and he has a good group to test. It'll be interesting.