Nielk
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HHS Buys Brooklyn Bridge from IOM - by Jerrold Spinhirne
https://www.facebook.com/notes/jerrold-spinhirne/hhs-buys-brooklyn-bridge-from-iom/833346000070314
Essentially, what the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did was to pay the non-profit Institute of Medicine (IOM) $1,000,000 for the naming rights to the neurological disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). However, the naming rights weren't the IOM's to sell. ME was named in 1956 and has been listed in the World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases as G93.3 in the "Diseases of the nervous system" section since 1969.
From a 1956 editorial in the UK medical journal Lancet, later attributed to Dr. E. Donald Acheson [Emphasis added]:
The objections to any but a purely descriptive name for a disorder without a known cause or established pathology are obvious. For this reason, the term "benign myalgic encephalomyelitis" may be acceptable. It in no way prejudices the argument for or against a single or related group of causal agents; and it does describe some of the striking features of a syndrome characterized by (1) symptoms and signs of damage to the brain and spinal chord, in a greater or lesser degree; (2) protracted muscle pain with paresis [partial paralysis, muscle weakness] and cramp; (3) emotional disturbances in convalescence; (4) normal C.S.F.; (5) involvement, in some variants, of the reticuloendothelial system [part of the immune response system]; (6) a protracted course with relapses in severe cases; and (7) a relatively benign outcome. It remains to identify this syndrome more precisely; but we believe its characteristics are now sufficiently clear to differentiate it from poliomyelitis, epidemic myalgia, glandular fever, the forms of epidemic encephalitis already described, and, need it be said, hysteria.
Read more here.
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