C. Featherstone,
I think the scientific point about CFS can be made this way: Your sister's girlfriend suffers from something, but we don't know what it is. Assuming that it is any particular kind of ailment, absent hard data, is not in her best interest. There is a set of symptoms that seem to come as a package. That package has been named CFS. Because CFS is idiopathic, there is no scientific reason to rule any cause out including psychosomatic causes. In fact, psychosomatic effects are the ones that have to be ruled out first, witness placebo-controlled drug studies. To say that CFS may be psychosomatic does not reduce its seriousness at all. Psychosomatic conditions ruin peoples' lives and even kill them. What's more the medical community's not only has a tendency to ignore some problems, it also has a tendency to promote others. It is entirely in the medical community's interest to tell us that there are many things wrong with us and that these things can be cured only with a pill, procedure or therapy. Doctors hate things the can't fix. That's one of the reasons that the age of snake oil is not dead and never will be so long as people don the vestments of the learned, tell people "I can fix it" and take checks, cash, credit cards and kudos for their services.
I think people who criticize "Western" medicine on the grounds that it is not open to new therapies, and new maladies on which to use those therapies, are misguided. The history of medicine clearly shows that it has always been open to excessive treatment of dubious merit, pure flim-flams and snake oil from the first. Look how the supermarket shelves are filling with "herbal" remedies inspired by the notion that using them somehow pulls one away from cold, capitalist medicine into a warm "holistic" bosom. St. John's wart and it's untested, unregulated (now specifically unregulated and unregulatable thanks to recent law) counterparts are big money makers. Which business do you think capitalists want to be in, the business of developing drugs and scientifically testing them for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, or the business of digging up a root and making any claim you want about it? Do you think Merck spends all that money out of the goodness of its heart? Do you think Eli Lilly wouldn't fire all those chemists if it could ignore the FDA and the community of *scientific* medicine? You think Pfizer would hate it if CFS became a recognized syndrome and a new market for an anti-viral drug it's spent millions developing?
The medical community will give "affirmation" to anybody it can.
>From people whose noses are "too big" to people whose breasts are "too
small" to people who claim that they are women trapped in mens' bodies.
If you claimed you were a fish, you might even be able to find a surgeon
who would give you gills. The medical community is happy to oblige a host
of cultural, sociological and psychological disorders with medical
intervention. Looking for affirmation is the best way to get cut up,
drugged and rooked. Looking for hard science while keeping an open,
skeptical mind (which is intrinsic to science) is the way to get well.
peace, and good health