Validity of chronic fatigue bolstered by research
By Brent Handel
June 26 2015 issue
"For decades, plaintiffs’ personal injury lawyers have fought an insurance establishment that, at best, did not understand the condition and usually considered it made up. According to Beyond Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Redefining an Illness, a recently released report by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the lack of understanding has been compounded by doubts over the validity of the disease which hindered medical research and prevented possibly hundreds of thousands of people from being properly diagnosed. Although the panel’s findings do not set policy, the IOM is highly regarded and its recommendations are often accorded credibility by the U.S. Congress and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and therefore the report likely will become a major tool for defining ME/CFS for diagnostic and research purposes in the United States, which will further ground-breaking research....
Hopefully the IOM report will give chronic fatigue syndrome and the over 400,000 Canadians who suffer from it the legitimacy it deserves, and will result in a sizeable shift in funding by the CIHR.
Meanwhile, the IOM report should be used by litigators which could result in a seismic shift in the nature of civil litigation for disability claims and auto insurance claims involving ME/CFS. As one member of the panel put it, “this is not a figment of (patients’) imagination. This is an all-too-common, complex disease that needs to be diagnosed.”
