Something has changed, and for the better. It is an exciting time.
The stakes, well, the stakes are what they always were: M.E will happily claim your entire life if you make a wrong move, but, on the flip-side; there is now a chance for sustained improvement.
For too long M.E research has been plagued with bias. Yet now, at long last, all sides of the M.E argument are on the table. Sure, the table is cracking under the opposing forces of medicine's chronic bias toward behaviourism and activism's aggressive counter-bias towards biomedical research, but for those M.E patients and physicians who can LEAVE THE WAR BEHIND, there is right here in front of us, an opportunity, a crack, a chink in M.E's dark and seemingly impenetrable armour: A chance to recover function.
We all know that biology rules behaviour: Think of the behavioural limitations imposed by a broken leg. Additionally and perversely however: we all know that behaviour can rule biology: Again, think of our choice to limit the movement of a broken leg, it's a behavioural one, in this case, to promote healing and return to full function.
Behaviour and biology work together, for good or for ill. It is time for all those M.E patients who want to get better and all those doctors who want help them to put down their respective cudgels and, instead, look at the true riches we already have on the table.
If you still want to believe that patient behaviour absolutely doesn't matter or, conversely, that biology plays no real part in perpetuating M.E, that's fine. You are, I have no doubt, correct. However your extremism is correct only at the extremes: the bulk of this problem, in fact the interesting part of the illness M.E, eludes you.
Around the world M.E patients exist *right now* in an impossible bind. Within context, exercise is both vital and necessary and it is harmful and contraindicated. Those patients and physicians who can fully embrace this paradox are the ones working on restoring function to people with M.E.
Everyone else is playing catch-up.
