Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (MEDICAL HUMANITIES SERIES)
More than 800,000 in the U.S. may suffer from chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome--CFS. Bad enough, Wall says, that they suffer in isolation, often without medical intervention; worse, many with symptoms go undiagnosed. They are frequently dismissed as "mental" by people who expect that everyone always recovers from a bout of flu, which is what CFS initially resembles, complete with sore throat, head- and muscle ache, and fatigue. With CFS, however, those symptoms escalate for weeks, months, and years. The CFS sufferer becomes increasingly debilitated, incapable of carrying out the most mundane tasks, often bedridden for weeks at a time. It's one thing if people are unsympathetic, but because there is no definitive test to reveal a specific cause, and no renegade germ to blame, physicians have been slow to recognize CFS. Yet it has been around as a subset of symptoms since the early 1980s, maybe longer. Wall doesn't demonize the medical establishment but does disdain practitioners who write CFS off as "yuppie flu," and leave sufferers feeling isolated and medically invisible.Donna ChavezCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved