Anyone have a link for full article?

[Levi]

............

 

[_Kim_]

Levi

I can access the article. I will PM you with my password so you can too. Will you re-post some of the more salient quotes here?

 

[gracenote]

always been curious about this

Thanks for pulling out that quote, Levi. From the article above regarding PWCs:

Patients regard themselves as having serious physical problems, which have unknown physical causes and which require physical examination.

Here's one thing I've always been curious about and I don't think I've ever read or heard anyone mention:

Do clinically depressed patients go to their doctors believing that they, too, have physical problems with unknown physical causes?

 

[gracenote]

organic vs. functional

Levi,

I envy your brain. I can't seem to hold two competing or complementary thoughts in my head all at the same time. I won't be disagreeing with what you posted, but I do cringe a bit at the psychoanalytic terms of "somatization," "conversion disorder" and "repressed psychic distress," along with the phrase "symptoms eerily similar to CFS."

A well trained clinician will have lots of tools to identify organic vs functional illness.

This is the problem is it not? "Well trained clinicians" have identified CFS not as organic but as functional. Just look at a book titled The Psychopathology of Functional Somatic Syndromes: Neurobiology and Illness Behavior in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Gulf War Illness, Irritable Bowel, and Premenstrual Dysphoria by Peter Manu. This book is full of peer reviewed studies "proving" that CFS is functional. It sort of made me "typically" depressed.

Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say for now.

 

[gracenote]

"well trained"

From Levi,

So I have no problem with the psychiatric profession. What I have a problem with is a psychiatric professional who has an ace to grind, an agenda to push, and most of all, cynical bias due to a profit motive for favored therapies like CBT/GET that bypass the important steps my doc took to do a diagnosis of exclusion.

I'm very happy that your experience was positive. And I don't want to infer that I think all in the psychiatric profession are misguided because I do not believe that. But I also think there are those who do not go the extra steps your doctor did, who are completely well-meaning and "well trained," simply because they have not been educated to look beyond these labels.

I think I have read too much of the "functional illness" research to not be more concerned about even those in this discipline who have no agenda. I wonder what a meta analysis of the literature would show in regards to this question.

 

[gracenote]

descriptive title

Hey Levi,

I'm done for now. I cannot make sense of anything anymore.

I am quite amazed, though, that this thread you started with the very descriptive title of "Anyone have link for full article?" has gotten 140 views so far. Think how many views you could get with a title like "Definitive cause for ME/CFS found." Wouldn't that be fun?