So why is this only making the right-wing press in the UK? Or am I missing something?
I do think this is a bit of a trend. My own interpretation is that the right wing press like to see experts brought down a peg or two, particularly in terms of the received wisdom of the "liberal elites", of which medical science is one. This tends to err more towards stories about doctors and government agencies interfering with "the family" (as typified in The Express) rather than these kind of stories, but the right has, in recent years, been generally happy for science to be wrong about all sorts of things (climate change being the obvious one) and so this slips neatly into the narrative. Add to that the fact that the Mail would whore out their grandmothers for a headline and one of the Barclay Brothers, who own the Telegraph, has ME himself and you generally have a more receptive audience for these stories.
On the other hand, The Graun is very much pro science on climate change, GM crops, etc, which is all very well but ends up meaning that it's always happy to sit behind the scientific establishment, even when it's making a fool of them. And they've always loved a bit of mind/body, "we're all a bit mad really, aren't we, when you think about it,
in a very profound sort of way" kind of equivocation (so long as it isn't lapping at their own door and preventing them from getting medical treatment, presumably). The Times, which is more or less quite a centre ground paper, veers more in this direction, though it appears that they might be changing their tune (see other threads) which I suppose could be a bellweather. Or maybe not.
That said, online leftish papers like the Indie and particularly the Huffington Post have been very supportive of patients. And The Mail would turn on us in a flash if someone stripped to their bikini for pics and said that CBT cured their ME and made them go back to their cheating husband. So maybe that's all just a load of old bollocks. But it kept me occupied for about 15 minutes,
so that's all right.