I agree with Duncan.
As patients, we have become pretty inured to bad and, more often, abysmal coverage of ME. While there are good elements of this article and it at least doesn't suggest the disease is psychogenic, we should hold coverage of this disease to a higher standard, particularly when it comes from an institution like Columbia. I don't say this to criticize the author (or Mady, for that matter), however, as I recognize the difficulty of learning about this disease given such widespread misinformation.
Articles that quote wild prevalence estimates, list inaccurate and generally trivial-sounding symptoms, and regurgitate the lie that the lack of progress in this disease is a product of disease complexity, rather than political and social bias and disinterest, advance us very little, to my mind. It is not enough that people eventually come to believe that chronic fatigue syndrome (or some twisted version of ME in which chronic fatigue is the defining symptom) is real and serious.
For coverage to make the right difference in changing medical and societal perceptions of ME, it needs to introduce the right framework for understanding the disease right up front, otherwise readers will just see what they read in the context of their own presuppositions. This is particularly true when it comes to doctors, who often hold deeply rooted stereotypes about what "CFS" is. As others have noted, that means describing the disease accurately, and right up front. It means not just describing the right symptoms and accurate estimates of prevalence, but explaining how severe can be their impact, that the sickest patients are bedridden and may struggle even to brush their teeth, as Duncan noted. For articles about ME more broadly, it means explaining right up front the distinction between ME and CFS -- that ME is a terribly devastating disease that has been seen and studied as an organic disease since the 1930s, but was recast as a psychological disease following the outbreaks in the late 80s -- and being very clear that the former is the entity being studied.
When an article sets the wrong tone in the first sentence, you can be sure that those who bother to read won't come away from it with the impressions we wish.
I definitely agree that this article is better than what we've seen in the past, but it's a far cry from the sort of coverage that will lead people to understand just how badly HHS has managed this disease and just how desperate are patients for hope and relief of suffering. Not every article need tick every box, but we should expect and demand clearer and more accurate coverage than this.