A new group member had an appointment with a new neurologist and commented on < the doc's relatively casual statement that all - yes ALL - CFS patient reveal the same type of frontal lobe damage on PET imaging, varying only by degree of severity. According to this neurodoc, those with less damage nonetheless have considerable abnormalities. He added that CFS patients' brains "light up" exactly as ADD patients' brains do in the frontal lobes. Nobody questions the validity of ADD; in fact, it seems doctors are almost falling over themselves to diagnose ADD. >
This is the question that has been nagging CFS patients for decades. The virtually identical symptoms in MS are readily accepted as real, but when presented as part of CFS, are derided as "all in your head". In the early days, some doctors were misdiagnosing it as "atypical MS", which makes me wonder why some of my doctors didn't make the MS connection when assessing my symptoms, instead of jumping directly to depression/anxiety. Those who know me well tell me that I come across as confident and self-assured, which is a good sign that I'm not depressed and anxious; apparently, the mere fact that I'm female was enough to prompt a psychological diagnosis from misogynistic doctors regardless of what physical problem my symptoms resemble.
Just why is it that the inability to concentrate in ADD is believable and but when it's part of CFS it is not? Is it because ADD occurs more frequently in male children and CFS occurs most often in adult females? Which puts it back to the same misogynism described by Dr. Carol Jessop in the 1980s, when her severely ill female patients were returned to her with erroneous psych diagnoses, but a less affected male patient was awarded a diagnosis of "obviously a virus, but one we don't have a test for."
Haven't women made any progress in the past 20 years? Do we still get no respect from male doctors just because we're women? All the strides we've made in business and politics, even women astronauts, mean nothing if we're still being treated as lesser beings when we go to the doctor.
One of our male CFS activists has as his particular pet peeve that NIH files CFS under "Women's Health" despite the fact that 30% of patients are male. Obviously, it's filed there so they can pretend it's just something related to hormones and menopause, the same attitude many female patients get from their male doctors. It belongs under neurology.
This information that it looks the same as ADD on brain scans proves that it belongs under neurology and is not something related to gender or false assumptions that women will make any excuse to avoid having to work.
How much objective medical information will it take before the medical community accepts that CFS is real, it is organic, it is neurological?
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