Talk:Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome

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CFS Community Link

I have a Chronic Fatigue Forum and Blog, I wanted to add it to the CFS Links Section. My site is www.chronicfatiguetreatments.com There is also a pretty extensive treatments blog and CFS News. Let me know what you guys think

Methylation cycle

I wanted to add some information about methylation cycle and cfs. Im using that treatment right now and its helping me alot. Is it ok if i write about it ,if so where should i put it

Old talk page archived

Page was over 160kb, archived.

Note: please do not feed trolls posing as doctors or medical students who post messages here about how CFS is "funny" and is not taken seriously by doctors.

◄██ Unit 5 (Talk) ██► 18:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

He did not say CFS is funny, he said the article is funny. He did not say CFS is not taken seriously by doctors, he said many doctors consider it to be a somatoform disorder. And it was not trolling. Despite being a CFS sufferer, I was able to see where he was coming from. 86.129.148.112 10:29, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Australian Guidelines

In the (now archived) discussion page, MikeEsp made the following statement:

"The Canadian definition has I believe influenced the latest Australian guidelines though I can't remember what that said exactly and I've lost the link I had for that."

I know of at least two such guidelines issued recently in Australia, both serious documents worth reading:

1. http://www.sacfs.asn.au/index.html

(Check the right hand column for downloads. The specific document is 'ME/CFS Guidelines: Management Guidelines for General Practitioners (English)', but there are also other interesting documents available on this site that people may wish to read.)

2. http://www.mja.com.au/public/guides/cfs/cfs2.html

(Has a PDF version link on this page.)

The final version of the MJA guidelines, done under the auspices of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, was published in 2002 (with the original draft released in 1997). So it cannot have been influenced by the Canadian guidelines, which were published in 2003.

However, the 'ME/CFS Guidelines: Management Guidelines for General Practitioners' were published in 2004, and list the Canadian guidelines in the references section, so probably were influenced quite a bit by them.

Bricker 20:59, 15 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

dividing this article up

Just been looking at the Multiple sclerosis article, a disease just as confusing as ME/CFS, but with a much more sensible article structure and division. Perhaps we should begin to move bits of the article to other pages, such as "Proposed Etiologies for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" and so on. The article is fairly long and doesnt appear properly at all on a modern AXIM PDA. And maybe also get rid of that table - it doesnt look very nice and I dont think the formating is amazing either. Thedreamdied 00:35, 30 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other pages could be CFS Research, CFS Proposed Etiologies and CFS Controversy, so the endless repetition of how hard to diagnose/how people dont understand etc etc could go elsewhere and make this a purely medical article. Thedreamdied 14:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unsure where to put new research

This article is very confusing in its present state. There has been some new research into CFS and memory, showing a difference between CFS patients and controls regarding medial prefrontal region activation in n-back tests. The abstract is here. Gregs 23:48, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, the article is ridiculously confusing. There needs to be a new break-off page entitled CFS Research, or similar, for this kind of thing. Thedreamdied 14:43, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just read this and thought I'd pop it in here... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070108191506.htm 9 January 2007 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.6.90.165 (talk • contribs)

"Psychiatric" stigma?

I came across this article after reading about Ken Wilber's recent seizures and serious medical problems. I was wondering about the sentence referring to "... the damaging public (and even medical) perception of CFS as a psychiatric or even psychosomatic condition." I've heard this a number of times, but I've never understood the, shall we say, ladder of stigma implied by this. Why would it be damaging to investigate or consider a psychological origin or component to the condition? Sure, health insurance is much more likely to pay for physical health care than for mental health care, but isn't that irrelevant compared to actually finding out what's going on so it can be treated? If suggesting (for example) psychologically-based therapies for CFS is considered damaging, or worse, insulting or even taboo, doesn't this have a chilling effect and bias on the overall program of research?

I ask because I tend to think that ultimately medicine in general would be much more effective if everyone (patients and doctors alike) considered behavioral changes to be the best first-line of prevention and even sometimes treatment. I think this is already widely discussed in terms of the major killers such as heart disease and obesity, which are certainly not psychiatric in any sense. No one who had a heart attack is insulted when their doctor tells them they need to start exercising more, and no one thinks that means their heart attack wasn't real, or that they're a bad person, or anything like that. Is there some reason to believe that CFS is considerably less amenable to the same kind of, say, holistic approach?

By the way, I hope it's obvious that I'm not trying to say that Ken Wilber's 13 seizures were "psychosomatic"...

Anyway, I haven't participated in the Talk section of wikipedia before, so I apologize if these comments are inappropriate to this forum. I am sure they will be edited out promptly if necessary! Omgoleus 00:49, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just removed that sentence. It was added a year ago as part of a number of "minor edits and clarifications". However it is inappropriate here. It is very unfortunate that there is a huge stigma to psychiatric conditions among the public, and this makes CFS research very difficult. Psychosomatic illnesses have an even greater stigma, and even many doctors think that psychosomatic = imaginary illness (which is incorrect). This is strange considering that psychosomatic illnesses account for over 50% of doctor visits and disability payments, as a result of stress-induced illnesses. --Sciencewatcher 22:23, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sciencewatcher, you apparently have problems differentiating between Chronic Fatigue and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The latter is a neurological Illness (as classified by the WHO), and has - according to the CDC - a biological, not a psychological root. Your personal opinion in this issue is of no importance. Therefore: Please back up your POV with factual evidence and avoid weasel words - otherwise I and others will revert your edits. A note of caution: If you try to back up your psychological constructs, see to it that the Papers you cite use the current CDC (Fukuda) selection critera. (This is not the case in most publications which "prove" that CFS can be cured by psychological interventions, so be warned, basing your arguments on those will not get you very far...)