Brian Walitt
Another week – another controversy for ME/CFS and the NIH. ME Action’s recent post stating that the lead clinical investigator in the NIH’s big intramural study believes ME/CFS and FM are psychosomatic disorders has understandably raised a storm of controversy.
But is there more to the story? A deeper look suggests there is. Find out more in
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This NIH video further clarifies what Brian Walitt is about. I think it will clarify some things about certain areas of the NIH also.
Demystifying Medicine 2013 – Pain: How It Happens and What Can Be Done? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DTwkooHUF8
Brian Walitt says, “Fibromyalgia is a constant state of perceived physical and existential suffering in the absence of any observable physical symptoms.”
For more links and information the following is a good source:
http://me-pedia.org/wiki/Brian_Walitt
I’m too sick to post more. I hope this helps.
Where is Walitts objective proof for his statements? It is only an idea of his sick mind. He can’t deal with things he can’t explain. He thinks he’s GOD and knows everything. He also believes the earth is still flat.
Cort, have you watched the video from the link I posted? The whole thing is important. I think it’s very clear what this man is about. Do you understand what somatoform means? Do you understand what happens when that label gets put on you? Do you want to tell the Davis/Dafoe family that Whitney has a somatoform disorder? Do you want to tell Criona Wilson that her daughter Sophia Mirza died of a somatoform disorder? Do you want to tell Kay Gilderdale that her daughter Lynn died of a somatoform disorder? What about all the other people with ME/CFS? What about Karena Hansen? What about the children with ME/CFS and the people who haven’t even been diagnosed yet? Do you want to tell me and all the people that come to this web site that they have somatoform disorders or that it doesn’t matter if we’re labeled that way? You can try to have a somatoform disorder if you want one to support Brian Walitt’s research but I don’t have one. I have ME/CFS and I imagine I’m not alone here. I don’t know if they’ll remove Brian Walitt from the study or not. I certainly hope that they do and I don’t want any of our limited funding paying this man’s paycheck. But as a community, I think we need to be clear headed about this and work together as much as we can. I’m concerned that you, as a leader in our community, seem to have your own perspective on what this man is about.
Brian Walitt thinks ME/CFS is a somatoform disorder. He’s made a career out of viewing many conditions/diseases as somatoform disorders. On the video they even talk about how the x-rays of people with osteoarthritis don’t always correspond with their pain levels and how pain is a subjective experience that is affected by our emotions and how much we pay attention to it. Do you want to tell people with osteoarthritis that they have a somatoform disorder? Brian Walitt goes through a list of disorders/diseases and lumps them all together as somatoform symptoms. It’s all one thing. Pain costs 600 billion dollars a year. Please watch the video.
Lastly, he calls ME/CFS a somatoform disorder, as well as describing it as a functional disorder. How can we then have a control group that has functional disorders? What are the odds that an ME/CFS/Somatoform Disorder/Functional Disorder group may match a control group of Functional Disordered patients? I will trust them when we have the appropriate channels of communication with them, when they behave in a trustworthy manner, fund our disease at an appropriate level, fund independent researchers and do research that will benefit all patients with this disease.
I’m very ill and it’s too much for me to do this. Please watch the video. I can’t do this. Other people need to talk about it. Thank you.
I am going to use this to teach my students about a poorly constructed and fallacious argument.
There is an old saying:
Absence of proof
is not
proof of absence
I have to calm down and get this out. After watching his video, it appears to me he wants to be “let off the hook” and believes other fm/ cfs doctors would like to be let off the hook of actually curing this horrible illness. You see the medical community at large has not been able to figure out this illness (yet) and wouldn’t it just be so much better for everyone if we had a different narrative? In other words you are not sick with fm, you are experiencing symptoms you’ve seen on tv, or you are living a normal existence within the parameters of what it means to be a living person. Well the new narrative he proposes sure would take a lot of pressure off the medical community to find a cure or even a cause. I can tell you that getting up every morning as if I have had no sleep is not within the normal parameters of anybody I know. Up to age 34 I got up in the morning and had energy I can now only dream about. When I got sick with this at 34 my life was completely taken away. Brian walitt is a sad excuse for a dr. If he is not going to help us find the cause/ cure, he could at least have the decency to get the hell out of the way. Oh and keep your mouth shut about an illness you cannot have any idea about. Unless you have lived with this unrelenting illness you cannot know the utter devastation it brings. He is speaking about something he knows not.
Cort: Is the enrollment in the new NIH clinical study
closed. I tried to find it on the NIH website and could
not. Also there was the web address in something I read
that was not valid: http://clinicalstudies.info.nih.gov/cgi/wais/bold032001.pl/A_16-N-0058.html@chronic@fatigue@syndrome
Thanks Cort.
Lynne in Pennsylvania