ArticleMedical humanities2019
Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: controversy, morality and paradox.
Article in Medical humanities, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Making recovery conceivable: perspectives from healthcare professionals using psychologically and behaviourally informed approaches to chronic fatigue syndrome.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2026Article
- Integrating reflex, feedback, and prediction: a tiered model of physiological regulation for contemporary medical education.Frontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- Patients' experiences of living with Long Covid and their beliefs about the role of psychology in their condition.Journal of health psychology · 2025Article
- 'We Don't Have to Prove to People How We're Feeling': Understanding the Role of Peer Support Groups in Countering Epistemic Injustices in Long COVID at a US Centre.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2025Article
- Acquiring a new understanding of illness and agency: a narrative study of recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2023Article
- The fragile process of Homecoming - Young women in recovery from severe ME/CFS.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2023Article
- (Dis)respect and shame in the context of 'medically unexplained' illness.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2022Article
- "The Rest of my Childhood was Lost": Canadian Children and Adolescents' Experiences Navigating Inflammatory Bowel Disease.Qualitative health research · 2022Article
- The illness-disease dichotomy and the biological-clinical splitting of medicine.Medical humanities · 2021Article
- Epistemic in/justice in patient participation. A discourse analysis of the Dutch ME/CFS Health Council advisory process.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
- A Comprehensive Update of the Current Understanding of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.Anesthesiology and pain medicine · 2021Review
- Article
- [Subjectivity and objectivity, illness and disease].Der Nervenarzt · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person's subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, medicine has made great progress in finding and treating associated disease. However, not all illnesses are successfully relieved by treating the disease. In some such cases, the patient's suffering can only be reduced by treatment that is focused on the illness itself. Chronic disabling fatigue is a common symptom of illness, for which disease-focused treatment is often not effective, but for which illness-focused treatments (psychological or behavioural) often are. In this article, we explore a controversy surrounding illness-focused treatments for fatigue. We do this by contrasting their acceptance by people whose fatigue is associated with a disease (using the example of cancer-related fatigue) with their controversial rejection by some people whose fatigue is not associated with an established disease (chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS, sometimes called ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis)). In order to understand this difference in acceptability we consider the differing moral connotations of illness and disease and then go on to examine the limitations of the concepts of illness and disease themselves. We conclude that a general acceptance of illness-focused treatments by all who might benefit from them will require a major long-term change in thinking about illness, but that improvements to the care of individual patients can be made today.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.