I’ve been reading Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic by Hillary Johnson, an American journalist who has researched the rise and spread of the illness in America in painstaking detail, and the medical establishment’s failure to take it seriously....
Johnson...reports how the government felt there was surprisingly little lobbying by the sufferers of the illness, which is the way that ‘new’ diseases call political attention to themselves, and eventually, research money. No one seemed able to put two and two together that CFS-ers were just too sick and too tired to organise a lobby. Plus, the celebrity cases were not keen to identify themselves with the illness. Johnson reckons that the register of sufferers included James Garner, Robert Wagner, Morgan Fairchild, Cher, David Puttnam, Kirstie Alley and Cathy Lee Crosby, but few spoke out publicly. Cher was reported as falling ill for more than three years after a flu-like virus and another patient declared “I’d like to be in the room when you tell Cher… that her illness is due to ‘unachievable ambitions and poor coping skills.’”
