What a sad story...
I ve long thought about, why ME was dismissed from early on to be a serious physical, severely disabling and sometimes life threatening disease...and why psychiatrists gained unfortunately so much influence over time. And why the same cycle happened to a lot of other diseases like MS, Parkinson, Asthma, Atopy and Gastric Ulcera.
I think several reasons played and still play a role. Here is my reasoning (sry for the wall of text
:
1) We live in a society, which believes over all in mechanistic reasoning. This is a direct consequence of the scientific revolution, which formed our world more than anything the last 400 years. Things are only real, if they have a physical (or biological) cause. Anything else is dismissed. I agree with that. I am a naturalist, too, but this world view can sometimes cause problems, especially in medicine.
(Religion often tries to counter this view and spiritual people believe in a lot of things, which have no known or seen cause, but even they adopted the mechanistic world view in day to day life. People believe in God or in Krishna, but most of them agree that a car is driven by combustion and a virus is the root for their cold (and not a demon).)
2) The fundamental principle of all science is the unknown. Only, if you admit, that you don't know, why the world functions the way it does, you can start to look for new theories, new evidence and new ways to find out the real underlying principles. If you pretend to know (because of an old book or because an old wise man told you why), you stop looking and stop searching for new answers.
3) Medicine is only half-scientific and not a core natural science. It is rather an applied science and evidence based medicine only gained more and more influence in the last 50 years. It is well documented, that going to a doctor before the beginning of the 20th century was a bad idea and reduced your chances of survival in almost any cases. Physicians are as old as mankind, but natural sciences are not. Physicians in the early times had often only their experience and some books with a lot of false information. Even today it is estimated, that in 40% (!!) of the cases used therapies are nothing more than a good (or bad) guess (and work mostly through the placebo effect) and the other 60% are based on good and reliable science. Ill people are desperate and want to get healthy again, it is only natural to try some approaches or drugs, which doctors used for a long time, but have in reality no scientific base. It is better than nothing.
4) All this comes together, when people are clearly sick, but the doctors cannot find the cause. They often fall into the trap of their mechanistic reasoning and think it cannot be real, because they cannot see any known physical or biological cause, but they don't make the next step and start to think scientifically. Today the problem is worse than fifty years ago, because our high standard of technology gives us (and sometimes doctors) the false impression, we know anything fundamental about the body and the world (but we clearly do not). A real scientist would stand back and admit the unknown. He would say to himself, alright, the patient is very sick and I cannot find the cause, because I just don't know it yet. In practise most doctors don't do that, they stay to their catalog of known diseases and traditional approaches or ask the higher authorities like an older doctor, what do to. In emergency situation and well known diseases this is a real blessing. Scientific discussion in such situations is useless or harmful. In lesser known and not fully understood diseases it can lead to ignorance, pseudoscience and finally disaster.
5) Something has to fill the gap, when doctors cannot find the cause. And this gap is primarily filled by the field of psychiatry and today by the field of psychosomatics. The incredible complex brain, the psychology and the character of the patient must be responsible for symptoms, if we cannot explain them through other bodily mechanisms. They can fill the gap so easily, because a lot of psychiatric theory is just a good guess and incredible hard to prove through the complexity of the brain and our psychology. It gets worse, if the patient does not get better and psychiatrists reason the cause is the will of the patient himself. Unconsciously the patient doesn't want to solve his problems etc. You couldn't say this, if the heart doesn't get better, because the heart has no personality and no will.
One of my favourite examples of this dangerous cascade is the Torsion Dystonia, a genetic disease, primarily found in some jewish families. It leads to painful muscle contractions, usually beginning in one arm or leg. 60 years ago, nobody knew the cause and the doctors couldn't find anything wrong. So they finally reasoned it is a problem of the mind. The only available treatment was decades of psychoanalysis. It didn't really help anybody, but nevertheless it wasn't dismissed at all. Today we know, the reason for TD is a gene mutation in some important nerves, which are responsible for muscle communication. The mutation is dominant, so it runs in certain families. Today it is treated with physical therapy, some drugs and Botox. But all this was unknown 60 years ago. It wasn't even known, what the DNA looks like.