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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#1
Magical Realist Offline
"In 2011, sitting at a restaurant with friends, Jennifer Brea was about to sign the check for her meal when she discovered she no longer knew how to write her name.

“I couldn’t tell my hands how to move,” she said. “I couldn’t draw the side of a circle.”

The moment was a turning point for Brea, who over the next few weeks rapidly deteriorated until, she said, “I became too weak to even sit up in a wheelchair.” A Ph.D. student in Harvard’s government department at the time, “I would be in lecture, and I would understand each individual word the professor was saying, but I could not for the life of me form meaning from the sentences.” Sometimes, she said, “I would lose the ability to think or speak in any language.”

For almost two years, Brea went through 15 different doctors and a host of different diagnoses, none of which seemed to fit her symptoms: She was told she was suffering from final-exam stress, she said, or an inner-ear infection, or depression, or conversion disorder. “One of my neurologists told me that all my symptoms were being caused by some distant trauma that I might not be able to recall,” she said.

From her own online research, Brea suspected chronic-fatigue syndrome, an incurable condition described by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “unexplained, severe fatigue lasting at least six months that is not improved by bed rest.” While scientists have been unable to definitively pinpoint a cause, many believe that a viral infection can be a trigger; Brea traces her symptoms back to a 10-day period in 2011 when she battled a 104-degree fever. Eventually, she flew from Boston to Miami, where a chronic-fatigue specialist confirmed her suspicions.

Current estimates place the number of chronic-fatigue sufferers in the U.S. somewhere between 836,000 and 2.5 million, though less than 20 percent of those people have actually been diagnosed, according to the CDC. But patients in Brea’s situation may soon have an easier time attaching a name to their symptoms: In a study published last week in the journal Science Advances, researchers found that people with chronic-fatigue syndrome showed measurable differences in their immune systems, a discovery that may enable doctors to diagnose the disease more quickly down the road—and one that sheds more light on its still-mysterious biological origins.

“It’s been a highly stigmatized disorder. There’s been many naysayers that don’t even believe it’s a biological disorder,” said Mady Hornig, the lead researcher and a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health......."=====http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archiv...me/386662/
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#2
C C Offline
(Jul 11, 2015 10:29 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] There’s been many naysayers that don’t even believe it’s a biological disorder,” said Mady Hornig [...]


As a slight detour about a homonym relation to the topic that also garners skeptics...

Old Man: "I got the fatigues."

Scientist: "There are no fatigues."

Daniel Dennett: Consider what we should tell the benighted community of people who speak of "having fatigues" where we speak of being tired, exhausted, etc. They want us to tell them what fatigues are, what bodily states or events they are identical with, and so forth. This is a confusion that calls for diplomacy, not philosophical discovery; the choice between an "eliminative materialism" and an "identity theory" of fatigues is not a matter of which "ism" is right, but of which way of speaking is most apt to wean these people of a misbegotten feature of their conceptual scheme.
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