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Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

The reason folks are unhappy with your take is that many people are personally adversely affected by doctors and others ignoring their physical symptoms. It's worth looking up Stephanie Aston of New Zealand, who just died at age 33; she apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Several doctors told her she was faking her juvenile arthritis etc.

People like accusing others of faking their symptoms because it allows the accuser to avoid moral injury from doing nothing to help or even just the discomfort of witnessing the suffering of others with empathy.

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Yes, it it not a good moment politically to discuss the psychological correlates/causes of disease. Probably hasn't been since the AIDS crisis, to be honest.

In future decades we will hopefully be more mature around these subjects.

e: To be clear, the comment about AIDS was about the era of patient advocacy that it engendered.

It's super weird to me to claim CFS is caused by psychological issues. Imagine all the people who were whining about COVID shutdowns and isolating for 14 days or whatever, with people frothing at the mouth about how depressing and how stunted their children are for not going to school. Okay, wow, looks like CFS forces you to do all that isolating/missing school/etc, maybe that causes mental illness the way it caused that for the broader population...

> > It's worth looking up Stephanie Aston of New Zealand, who just died at age 33; she apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Several doctors told her she was faking her juvenile arthritis etc.

You don't die from EDS, unless it's the vascular type, and even then it's not the EDS but the catastrophic rupture of an artery (abdomen or aortic which has weak collagen due to EDS) that causes the death.

With a prevalence of 1 in 50,000-200,000 you can't fault the doctors for not seeing it or just branding it as very unlikely, of course the accusation of faking an illness should not be tolerated.

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