Viruses can cause organ tissue damages, that's enough for me to believe a virus can cause all sort of "syndromes"
I'm not on the denier side but harass me with fear, threats, and free movement mandates and I will deny that syndromes even exist.
* it’s impossible to observe fatigue objectively, it just appears people are lazy or low energy
* there’s no known (or at least there wasn’t last time I researched it) bio markers for CFS
* there’s no known evidence of viruses causes CFS, just speculation
Etc
Things have changed a lot over the last 30 years. I think most people including doctors accept CFS is real whereas that wasn’t the case in the past.
The case for the cause of CFS is still very much open, and I think it’s probably naive to say CFS is caused by viral infections. It’s probably the case that some CFS is caused by viral infections, but again, it’s hard to differentiate, it’s hard to prove, and even if you did, so what? CFS probably also has autoimmune causes, which themselves are diffuse in their root causes and mechanisms, and even psychosomatic roots in burnout and other extreme stress syndrome. Finally, when the causes are psychosomatic, that isn’t code for “fake,” it is literally a real issue it’s just not caused by an extrinsic agent. The health impact of extreme prolonged stress is not a joke, and it’s not the persons “fault.” There seems to be a real need for people to pin their CFS and other health issues on some external factor and not the abuse they’ve (or others have) subjected their psychology and by proxy their body to.
I think most doctors accept that CFS is real, but I also think most doctors would not call a somatic illness fake. See for instance these researchers [0] who are research somatic causes yet all agree there is a physical/hereditary component. Anxiety disorders also have a hereditary component and they aren't fake.
[0]: https://theguardian.com/society/2011/aug/21/chronic-fatigue-...
Some of the problems she had early on is that most doctors wrote her off as either lying or anxiety. More than one ER doc said there's no way that Covid could ever cause lasting symptoms other than lung damage, which she didn't have, so it's likely just anxiety. There was one DO she saw, during an admit for tachycardia, who said that he believed that she has a post-viral syndrome and knew of others with other post-Covid issues. The problem would be trying to convince his colleagues to believe it would be an uphill battle, so he hoped it was temporary for her. I know things have changed now but some doctors can be extremely arrogant and dismissive of patients (female patients more than male).
You have to go through a lot of education to become a doctor, so people naturally expect doctor's to be wise, but the truth is they are just good a memorizing things. They aren't necessarily smarter than any other person and have just as many blindspots.
* Source: My dad and uncle are doctors. My brother in law is a doctor. I have a friend who is a doctor. And I've known a lot of other doctors through them.
The doctor I dated for years never drank water. She loved diet coke. She ate mcdonalds constantly but avoided the bun. She was skinny though. I had to teach her how to pump gas because her dad did it for her until she was 22. She loved cocaine and moly. Currently cycles Adderall and Ritalin (or something very similar) so she doesnt get too used to one or the other. I could list 20 other 'wtf?' type of things about her. Most others are similarly weird, careless, unhealthy, confused and logicless.
If she also skipped the fries (and had salad instead) that wouldn't be the worst imaginable diet.
Is your insight that doctors are regular educated humans suffering from the same flaws and vices as other regular educated humans?
> She loved cocaine and moly. Currently cycles Adderall and Ritalin (or something very similar) so she doesn’t get too used to one or the other.
Not sure what this is supposed to imply. I expect the same can also be said for at least 20% of doctors, dentists, SV, Big Law, Wall Street and Main Street in the 20-29 age range.
They are modern qualities of the loud morality failed majority these days. Just because it's common for celebrities and kids of rich people to do drugs and screw around, doesn't mean that's what my parents expect from their doctors.
Actually they are, your statement applies to any one of the examples I gave you of what society considers successful/prestigious careers. Silicon Valley is the poster child for stimulant and hallucinogen use/abuse, are they not similarly regular educated people?
> Just because it's common for celebrities and kids of rich people to do drugs and screw around
Where are you getting the idea that it's only common amongst celebrities and kids of rich people?
> They are modern qualities of the loud morality failed majority these days.
I don't even know what "loud morality failed majority" means but morality (particularly your personal definition of it) =/= professional competency.
The disconnect here seems to be your expectations (and definition of morality but that's a separate point). Your parents, and you, seem to be unaware of how common stimulant, alcohol and drug use is amongst white-collar professionals.
Sorry to disappoint but as a group physicians are no different. This has no relevance on professional competency. Fun fact for you the "fathers of modern medicine" who have all the diseases named after them and designed the residency education system were all overt cocaine addicts, thats part of why the hours are so long.
My point about celebrities and rich famous people was that they normalized it, to the point that you aren't even surprised doctors are druggies in their free time.
No one cars that some Uber programmer is on speed. More people would care to know that their doctor that recommends heart pressure medication is a druggy, because they'd know this personal doesn't really care about potential kidney damage in themselves, so of course they'll recommend you take kidney damaging heart medication without really explaining that that's what is happening.
If you left the SV and internet bubble, you'd learn that drug use and alcohol use is not liked by most in their higher level professionals.
(1) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v... (2) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.12.21263461v...
When those new findings challenge our current understanding, we get smarter as a species and work to alleviate the suffering by investing more money and time into these matters.
Points aside, your third point is largely concerning.
In type 1 diabetics there is some evidence of a post viral auto-immune cause in some cases.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/verified-covid-19-infe...
GBS for instance:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/guillain-ba...
Is linked to post viral or post bacterial infections, and even though here too there is a lack of complete understanding at least the symptoms are so clear (up to complete paralysis) that denying it seems pointless. It's also super rare, so there is no incentive to deny it.
But if COVID ends up putting a sizeable percentage of the workforce out of action that may well have serious implications for how we deal with chronic disease and post viral infections. Incidentally: this is one of the possible futures that various experts warned about during the early days of the pandemic, that it would be a decade or more before we would fully understand the impact and that by assuming the post infection consequences would be mild that we may have made a grave mistake.
Fortunately some of the more outrageous possibilities have so far not surfaced, this is one that we can deal with.
However, there is no known way to treat CFS. That problem is a much more valid excuse for a doctor to do nothing. But a doctor that refuses to acknowledge a patient's troubles because they don't know how to treat it is a bad doctor.
Some investigation revealed though that is has become more difficult for GPs to ignore the pressure put on them by insurers to send patients back to work.
It's like denying someone has a broken arm and gets ridiculed for not wanting to play tennis.
https://forums.phoenixrising.me/attachments/howard-bloom-cfs...