In the summer of 1989, Leonard Jason fell ill with the worst sore throat of his life. He couldn\u2019t shake it. As the leaves turned red and gold that fall, his energy and weight dropped dramatically, eventually forcing him to stop teaching at DePaul University in Chicago. For 14 years, he had been a highly successful psychology professor, flush with research grants, president of the community psychology division of the American Psychological Association, and director of clinical training at DePaul. Now just a simple phone call was enough to leave him exhausted and bedbound.<\/p>\n
The diagnosis? Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a recently coined name for myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Jason preferred the original because it sounded less trivial. Confusion and disagreements over the disease\u2019s name \u2013 now usually a hybrid abbreviation, most often CFS-ME in the UK or ME-CFS in the USA \u2013 have long reflected wider confusion and misconceptions about it.<\/p>\n
Jason\u2019s colleagues and friends were stumped. Perhaps most maddening were the well-meaning comments from people insisting they, too, had \u2018chronic fatigue\u2019. \u201cOne colleague suggested I think about another job as a cook at a fast-food restaurant,\u201d he says. Others encouraged him to just \u201cpull it together\u201d, as if this was simply mind over matter.<\/p>\n
Indeed, for decades the medical community had largely agreed it was a psychosomatic disorder. A 1970\u00a0review<\/a>\u00a0of 15 historical outbreaks of \u2018benign myalgic encephalomyelitis\u2019 dismissed most of them as mass hysteria. Today physicians aren\u2019t sure what to call the illness, let alone what to do about it. One of the few treatments to appear effective in clinical trials is rejected by many patients. Because it focuses on exercise and cognitive therapy, they say it presumes a psychological origin for their illness, which they consider as harmful as it is insulting. This has helped create one of the most disenfranchised, frustrated, fractious patient groups in history.<\/p>\nReference:<\/h4>\n
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