Dr. Anthony Komaroff of Harvard got a great editorial in a top journal - the Annals of Internal Medicine...\\
Following up on the release of the P2P and IOM reports Komaroff hit the readers of the Annals with some hard facts:
The IOM estimates that 836 000 to 2.5 million Americans have ME/CFS (5).
The direct and indirect economic costs of the illness to society are estimated to be between $17 billion and $24 billion annually.
Komaroff quashed persistent reports that ME/CFS is a symptom-based illness stating
Following up on the release of the P2P and IOM reports Komaroff hit the readers of the Annals with some hard facts:
The IOM estimates that 836 000 to 2.5 million Americans have ME/CFS (5).
The direct and indirect economic costs of the illness to society are estimated to be between $17 billion and $24 billion annually.
Komaroff quashed persistent reports that ME/CFS is a symptom-based illness stating
Simply restating what the reports said was more than enough:According to the most widely used case definition (6), the illness is characterized exclusively by symptoms; therefore, physicians have understandably wondered whether there are "real" underlying biological abnormalities. The IOM, AHRQ, and NIH panels concluded that there are such biological abnormalities
Komaroff ends with this powerful paragraph:After evaluating thousands of published articles, the IOM committee stated that "ME/CFS is a serious, chronic, complex systemic disease that often can profoundly affect the lives of patients" (5). Summarizing the committee's deliberations, Ganiats (1) said that the illness "is not, as many clinicians believe, a psychological problem," while emphasizing that psychiatric comorbid conditions occur in some patients with ME/CFS and need to be diagnosed and treated.
These reports from the IOM, AHRQ, and NIH demonstrate how much we have learned about ME/CFS and how much we still do not know. We do not understand its pathogenesis, and we do not have a diagnostic test or a cure. However, these recent reports, summarizing information from more than 9000 articles, should put the question of whether ME/CFS is a "real" illness to rest. When skeptical physicians, many of whom are unaware of this literature, tell patients with ME/CFS that "there is nothing wrong," they not only commit a diagnostic error: They also compound the patients' suffering.