0 stars - Not useful to anybody
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (The Facts) is a worthless little book that contains very few facts, in spite of being part of "The Facts" series. While it is imperative that with a disease as complex and poorly understood as CFS (CFIDS), authors muster as much data as possible, the authors of this book appear to have done very little scientific research. The sections on testing, causes, prevalence, and prognosis fail to cite a single study, ignoring the plethora of articles that have appeared in medical journals over the past three decades documenting immune system abnormalities, nervous system defects, cellular dysfunction, viral reactivation and hypoxia. Instead the authors rely on vague generalizations couched in language geared to an eight-year-old. The area of greatest concern to people with CFIDS--treatments--was positively skeletal, devoting as little as a single sentence to some of the more widely used medications. In sharp contrast, chapter after chapter was devoted to "psychosocial treatments" not one of which has ever been shown effective for treating CFIDS.
The underlying problem with this book is that the principal author is a psychologist. (If to a hammer everything is a nail, to a psychologist everything is a neurosis.) This is not to say that counseling is useless for people with CFIDS. This book devotes many pages to depression, anxiety, panic attacks, managing relationships, mood - all of which can be useful for those with emotional problems. However, to make counseling an essential component of treatment is to define CFIDS as a psychiatric illness. This is not a fact; it is a myth..
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (The Facts) is a worthless little book that contains very few facts, in spite of being part of "The Facts" series. While it is imperative that with a disease as complex and poorly understood as CFS (CFIDS), authors muster as much data as possible, the authors of this book appear to have done very little scientific research. The sections on testing, causes, prevalence, and prognosis fail to cite a single study, ignoring the plethora of articles that have appeared in medical journals over the past three decades documenting immune system abnormalities, nervous system defects, cellular dysfunction, viral reactivation and hypoxia. Instead the authors rely on vague generalizations couched in language geared to an eight-year-old. The area of greatest concern to people with CFIDS--treatments--was positively skeletal, devoting as little as a single sentence to some of the more widely used medications. In sharp contrast, chapter after chapter was devoted to "psychosocial treatments" not one of which has ever been shown effective for treating CFIDS.
The underlying problem with this book is that the principal author is a psychologist. (If to a hammer everything is a nail, to a psychologist everything is a neurosis.) This is not to say that counseling is useless for people with CFIDS. This book devotes many pages to depression, anxiety, panic attacks, managing relationships, mood - all of which can be useful for those with emotional problems. However, to make counseling an essential component of treatment is to define CFIDS as a psychiatric illness. This is not a fact; it is a myth..
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