If you want medical professionals to think you have a 'real' disease, consensus shows to call it "ME". I use the term "ME/CFS" here on the site as in Canada they are ID'd as the same illness under WHOs' ICD-10 G93.3. However, "CFS" is more commonly known: if I wanted to place a FaceBook ad for CFS I'm told that I'd get thousands of hits with that keyword; if I used ME I'd get none. So, here, where we all know we're sick, I use both terms to be more inclusive. This shows there are certain times to use "ME" and others to use "CFS", depending on what you're going for. Though I personally don't like the term "CFS", my specialist thinks we shouldn't drop it as a lot of awareness has been gained under it's banner. I don't know if I fully agree, but it's one point to consider. In the US under ICD9 CM, "ME" and "CFS" are two separate and mutually exclusive illnesses, which is the exact opposite of the situation in Canada. Hopefully we can all start using the stringent Canadian Consensus Criteria worldwide to diagnose ME/CFS to weed out those who are just chronically fatigued.
-Priya
Do you think it's a disease? A survey of medical students
Chrissy Erueti, Paul Glasziou, Chris Del Mar and Mieke L Van Driel
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BMC Medical Education 2012, 12:19 doi:10.1186/1472-6920-12-19
Published: 3 April 2012
Abstract (provisional)
Background
The management of medical conditions is influenced by whether clinicians regard them as "disease" or "not a disease". The aim of the survey was to determine how medical students classify a range of conditions they might encounter in their professional lives and whether a different name for a condition would influence their decision in the categorisation of the condition as a 'disease' or 'not a disease'.
Methods
We surveyed 3 concurrent years of medical students to classify 36 candidate conditions into "disease" and "non-disease". The conditions were given a 'medical' label and a (lay) label and positioned where possible in alternate columns of the survey.
Results
The response rate was 96% (183 of 190 students attending a lecture): 80% of students concurred on 16 conditions as "disease" (eg diabetes, tuberculosis), and 4 as "non-disease" (eg baldness, menopause, fractured skull and heat stroke). The remaining 16 conditions (with 21-79% agreement) were more contentious (especially obesity, infertility, hay fever, alcoholism, and restless leg syndrome). Three pairs of conditions had both a more, and a less, medical label: the more medical labels (myalgic encephalomyelitis, hypertension, and erectile dysfunction) were more frequently classified as 'disease' than the less medical (chronic fatigue syndrome, high blood pressure, and impotence), respectively, significantly different for the first two pairs.
Conclusions
Some conditions excluded from the classification of "disease" were unexpected (eg fractured skull and heat stroke). Students were mostly concordant on what conditions should be classified as "disease". They were more likely to classify synonyms as 'disease' if the label was medical. The findings indicate there is still a problem 30 years on in the concept of 'what is a disease'. Our findings suggest that we should be addressing such concepts to medical students.
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