Book gets ME/CFS wrong?

Remy

Administrator
Apparently, we are all just "humblebragging" about how busy and important we are?

Maybe some pointed Amazon reviews on Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhaustion: A History are in order (though admittedly, I have not read the whole chapter to know if she supports this view fully or not).

It doesn't look good though.

When Schaffner reaches the turn of the twentieth century, she introduces the biggest problem in her book: the gulf between theories about exhaustion and actual experiences of exhaustion.

This gulf is at its widest in her chapter on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a condition about which medical practitioners and patients often have extremely divergent opinions. Although most doctors and researchers agree that there is a microbiological trigger for the syndrome, they also see patients’ behavioral and psychological responses as perpetuating the condition.

At its extreme, this view holds that CFS is a psychological illness with physical symptoms. Most patients, meanwhile—often housebound, even bedbound, unable to do the simplest task without suffering debilitating exhaustion—vehemently reject this model, arguing that CFS is a physical, and only physical, disease.

In writing about CFS, Schaffner returns to an idea she first mentions in her introduction, borrowed from the medical historian Edward Shorter: that patients, absorbing the medical and cultural discourses of their time, unconsciously display the psychosomatic symptoms that doctors will take seriously.

Shorter is convinced that CFS is all in the mind, a twentieth-century version of hysteria with subjective symptoms (fatigue, muscle pain) both impossible to disprove and in line with what “doctors under the influence of the central-nervous paradigm [expect] to see”.
 

weyland

Well-Known Member
Man, the brits are really hitting it hard with this crap this year. Jo Marchant, Suzanne O'Sullivan, and now this.
 

Cort

Founder of Health Rising and Phoenix Rising
Staff member
Apparently, we are all just "humblebragging" about how busy and important we are?

Maybe some pointed Amazon reviews on Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhaustion: A History are in order (though admittedly, I have not read the whole chapter to know if she supports this view fully or not).

It doesn't look good though.
Oh gawd.....I wonder when this book was written.

I wonder if she would be interested in the fact that I got ME/CFS before it had a name and once it had a name my symptoms didn't change a whit!

I hope this wasn't published recently - I guess it was just written

Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

This is ivory tower divorced from reality stuff for sure. She ought to come on the Forums and talk to people who deal with this. She'd probably be terrified to.
 

Empty

Well-Known Member
They are the church of psychiatry trolls, just doing it for the sales. Fucking Idiots.
 
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