Index

Is CFS Real?
What if CFS is a Real Disease
Is CFS a New Problem?- Historial Review

Is CFS Real?
The following is from an article in the MEssenger by M.R.Hiller dated May 1997.

WHAT IF CFS IS A REAL DISEASE?

The medical profession is skeptical of disorders it does not understand, such as CFS. "Skepticism permeates our profession."wrote Dr.Thomas L. English. "Healthy skepticism is the 'in' attitude for intelligent, discriminating physicians". Yet, Dr.English questions how healthy it is for the suffering patient "if CFS is a real disease". He asks skeptical fellow doctors: What if you are wrong? What are the consequences for your patients"?

Dr. English himself suffers from CFS, and last year JAMA published his article directed to fellow phsyicians. He invited them to put themselves in the place of the suffering patient, describing the syndrome:

"You catch 'a cold' and thereafter the quality of your life is indelibly altered. You can't think clearly . . . Sometimes it's all you can do to read the newspaper or to follow the plot of a television program. Jet lag without end. You inch along the fog-shrouded precipice of patient care, where once you walked with confidence. Myalgias [muscle aches] wander about your body with no apparent pattern. Symptoms come and go, wax and wane. . . . You too might wonder about some of your symptoms had you not talked to other patients with similar experiences . . . or talked with physicians who have seen hundreds of similar cases. . . .

"I have talked with scores of fellow patients who went to our profession for help, but who came away humiliated, angry, and afraid. Their bodies told them they were physically ill, but the psychospeculation of their physicians was only frightening and infuriating not reassuring. It told them their doctors had little understanding of the real problem. . . . Are we to believe that just because symptoms are strange and unfamiliar they cannot be real? Are we to assume that our laboratory tests are capable of screening for new diseases as well as old? Distrust of new ideas is as old as humankind; so are the harmful consequences of that distrust."--JAMA, February 27, 1991, page 964. "You catch 'a cold' and thereafter the quality of your life is indelibly altered. You can't think clearly . . . Sometimes it's all you can do to read the newspaper or to follow the plot of a television program. Jet lag without end. You inch along the fog-shrouded precipice of patient care, where once you walked with confidence. Myalgias [muscle aches] wander about your body with no apparent pattern. Symptoms come and go, wax and wane. . . . You too might wonder about some of your symptoms had you not talked to other patients with similar experiences . . . or talked with physicians who have seen hundreds of similar cases. . . .

"I have talked with scores of fellow patients who went to our profession for help, but who came away humiliated, angry, and afraid. Their bodies told them they were physically ill, but the psychospeculation of their physicians was only frightening and infuriating not reassuring. It told them their doctors had little understanding of the real problem. . . . Are we to believe that just because symptoms are strange and unfamiliar they cannot be real? Are we to assume that our laboratory tests are capable of screening for new diseases as well as old? Distrust of new ideas is as old as humankind; so are the harmful consequences of that distrust."--JAMA, February 27, 1991, page 964.

Is this really a new clinical problem? How has it come to the public's attention?

Historical Review

An article published in the MEssenger by M.R.Hiller,
Special to the Guardian reveals the following.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has gone through an evolution of descriptive terms, but there is reason to believe the disease has been around for years. Symptoms and charactertistics assigned to CFS, at that time call nurasthenia, were described in 1750 by Sir Richard Manningham. There are also claims that descriptions of a similar disease were found in Hippocrates' writings.

CFS is probably not a new illness. Some have identified it with an array of symptoms that in the last century was called neurasthenia, a name drawn from the Greek denoting "lack of nerve strength." The symptoms of CFS are also similar to those of fibromyalgia, which is also known as fibrositis. Some even believe that CFS and fibromyalgia may be the same syndrome. Many outbreaks of CFS-like illnesses have been reported in previous decades, most of them in the United States. But they have also occurred in England, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Australia, and Greece. Names to describe the syndrome were Iceland disease, Akureyri disease, Royal Free disease, and others.

More recently, in 1984 about 200 people in the small town of Incline Village, near the California- Nevada border, suffered a flulike illness that persisted. "We knew them as productive, happy, vigorous adults," explains Dr. Cheney, who treated many of them. "All of a sudden they got sick and wouldn't get well. In some cases they were sweating so much at night their spouses had to get up and change the bed sheets."

Some disparagingly called this outbreak of illness at Incline Village Yuppie flu, since middle-class, upward mobile young people were predominately affected. It was thought that patients might be suffering from acute infectious mononucleosis, but tests for that disease came up negative for most of them. Blood tests, however, did reveal high levels of antibodies to the Epstein-Barr virus, a type of herpesvirus. Thus, for a time, the illness was commonly known as chronic Epstein-Barr.