I obviously don't know whether you live in the UK, but from what you write I suspect not, and I suspect the UK doctors/ researchers you have met have been a self-selecting group since almost none of the research money over the last few decades has been spent on biomedical research. Those of us who do live here are writing from the inside, and I am telling you about the totality of my experience, not 35% of it. I have visited just two specialist fatigue clinics (it is what they are called), one in the SE and one in the NW, and the doctors in charge of both were hostile and disparaging. I have moved area, and I have changed practice locally, but its is never any better. Please do not sweep aside our experience and knowledge of local conditions - we suffer enough gaslighting already.
The BPS model is written into Establishment policy regarding the illness, a fact of which you may not be aware. A government study into ME was commissioned in the early 1990s to which only BPS psychs were appointed. It concluded the illness was not physical and should be renamed CFS. Then, when NICE was set up to regulate the NHS, the government of the day appointed only BPS psychiatrists and psychologists to the CFS panel; they still retain the casting vote (Esther Crawley is one of them, and perhaps the most influential). Consequently the NICE guidelines for treatment of CFS/ME are based on a wrong understanding of the illness and are not fit for purpose. For instance, they still discourage doctors from authorising tilt table test and outright forbid the use of antiviral drugs. The patient community had to fight last year in order to force a review of the guidelines, and given the make-up of the panel we still have little confidence that the review will achieve very much.
As a result of these policy decisions, it became impossible to get help or referral from any doctor. For many years it was also impossible for pwME to obtain disability benefits, until a patient finally managed to establish the legal principle that the UK medical profession had to adhere to WHO guidelines on the classification of ME as a neurological disease. Since then there has been fudge. Government spokespersons will pay lip service to accepting ME as neurological but it is business as usual. It seems to me the psych lobby has got round the issue by intimating that our neurology has been screwed up by our illness thinking. ME is not taught in medical schools, and the UK press over the years has often been littered with stories of criminally insane ME activists threatening the lives of honest researchers.
So most doctors are hostile to ME patients, or at least those who have been ill for any length of time, and even those who are more enlightened are afraid to offer us treatment. Even my diagnosis of hypermobility took 20 years and I had to pay to see the specialist privately as my GP would not refer me.
With respect, history in this country has proved that it is counterproductive to ignore the political grip exercised by the BPS school, or to treat them as well meaning but wrongheaded individuals who can be persuaded by the emerging science.
I'm aware of the situation in the UK. I don't live in the UK, but one of the people I saw helped run the PACE trial, and the others have had links to clinicians and researchers in the UK. They've generally supported GET and CBT (despite this, a few have also done research into the biology of ME), and have had plenty of experience with researchers and clinicians in the UK (and probably especially the ones that support GET/ CBT). If anything, they are much more likely to say that most researchers think ME is psychosocial. I'm not denying that you, or anyone, has been treated unfairly. I've personally seen a number of doctors that have been very rude and dismissive.
You're right that the NICE guidelines are out of date. (In the 1990's and the 2000s, the psychosocial view was a very dominant view.) But even the current NICE guidelines are based on research that a reasonable proportion of ME specialists and researchers would agree with, of whom a large amount would still think it is biological. What matters to them, is what they think the evidence shows. And to many of those, the evidence indicates two things: that ME is treatable with GET and CBT, and might have a psychological component, but also that ME is biological. You can't say that the current NICE guidelines are proof that most doctors that specialise in ME think it is psychosocial.
I'm not saying anything about what the government thinks, or whether those NICE guidelines are correct or not, but regardless of the misguidedness of most ME researchers approach to treating ME, of the people I've spoken to, which is a big sample as far as the ME world goes, the overwhelming understanding I've got has been that most ME specialists and researchers - even if they agree with those outdated guidelines, even if they don't like pwME, and even if they're in the UK - think ME is biological. That might seem hard to believe, but that is the case. Even Esther Crawley and Simon Wessely are on the record of saying that ME has a biological component, and they are on the extreme end. It isn't necessarily in their interests to say that, but they have to, because it is undeniable.
I'm not saying the government cares about ME, or that it's treated well, or that ME patients are taken seriously, or that doctors aren't rude and dismissive, but I am saying, despite all that, a majority of ME researchers and specialists think it is predominantly biological, and most don't see supporting GET/CBT as in conflict with that. (They wouldn't see a reason to think that, because CBT and exercise therapy have been found to be helpful in other physical conditions. To them it isn't such a big deal.)
(also antiviral drugs haven't conclusively been found to be effective in ME. Trials are still ongoing, and most trials fail)
