Alternatively, sick patients desperate to get better have been written off or abused by their doctors for decades and that makes people angry.
Here’s a story of a girl who was made permanently worse after her condition was treated as psychosomatic and she was encouraged to gradually increase her activity. On autopsy her spinal nerves were lit up with inflammation:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44969741
Here’s another of a Danish girl who was taken from her parents and returned as a husk of her former self after legal challenge:
https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Karina_Hansen
There are thousands of stories of similar neglect.
I don’t know a single ME/CFS patients who would care if their condition was somatic if treating it as such was effective. People just want to get better.
Patients undergo treatment on the basis that it’s a somatic illness, it doesn’t work or makes them worse, and then they discover how few people there are looking for alternative approaches, and how flawed the studies supporting their treatment were.
I am curious what your background is. Are you an ME patient, or a doctor, or…?
