This is how research works. Every researcher views it through their own paradigm. Is it surprising that psychologists view our problems as psychological? That's how they see everything! Not sure why people taking this so personally.
The psychobabblers are not just investigating the disease through their own paradigm. They spin results to support their hypothesis, they engage in misleading media campaigns to support it, they ignore contrary evidence, they never question the validity of their hypothesis, and they attack competing hypotheses by employing various logical fallacies. They use their hypothesis to suggest that emotional, financial, physical, and medical support be withheld.
Other psychologists are able to objectively examine their own hypotheses, and present them honestly. I can respect that research, even if I find it to be of limited use when there is a much more urgent need to address the biomedical gaps in the research.
Like all researchers they chose their target group as the one most likely to benefit from the intervention. If this causes them to fudge the lines and recruit people that have illnesses not representative of people on this forum then so be it. That's the state of our illness. Scientists can't even agree on a classification. What do we have CFS? ME? Lyme? SEID??
I also don't particularly object to chronic fatigue research. I don't find it useful personally, since I don't have chronic fatigue, but I respect that it might help someone with something. However this mix-and-match approach to recruiting patients for studies is not done honestly. Chronic fatigue patients are recruited, and labeled with CFS. The results are then touted as applying to ME/CFS, even if there few or no ME patients involved at all. If they wish to investigate something which is not ME or even CFS, they should not label it as ME or CFS, nor try to apply their findings to ME/CFS patients.
1) There are no known universal bio-markers for ME. (although PEM might be but even that is not yet universally accepted)
Universal acceptance is not required for any disease. And in the case of fringe psychologists, it is unlikely they will ever accept a competing model, even when pathology has been proven.
That's why we are listed as having a syndrome. Science can't even classify what exactly our problem is. Its like when people had AIDS and nobody knew what caused it. How can doctors treat us when they can't classify what we have?
It can get a preliminary definition based on a set of symptoms and the exclusion of known alternative explanations for those symptoms. PEM is actually pretty unique, and as a symptom is much more useful in diagnosing ME than most symptoms are in diagnosing other diseases. But that requires understanding the experience of PEM, and many doctors seem to prefer taking the "fatigue" shortcut in making a diagnosis.
There are no real treatments yet. If there were an efficacious treatment for our disease we could expect that treatment. There is none however. Medical professionals just have to make guesses. Its very common to guess that a disease that science does not understand to be psychological. Its the default trash bin diagnosis
There are many treatments for ME symptoms which can improve quality of life. And when Orthostatic Intolerance is tested and treated, disability itself can be reduced. Treatment does not have to be curative, nor even result in substantial improvement in functioning, in order to be beneficial. Yet the psychobabbler approach is to limit even palliative treatments, and go straight for the completely hypothetical, unproven, and even disproven "cure" of CBT and GET.