The Truth About Getting Sick in America: The Real Problems with Health Care and What We Can Do by Dr. Tim Johnson, reviewed by R. Sanderson

With a thirty year history as ABC's chief medical editor and senior medical contributor, member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and former staff member of Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Tim Johnson takes a candid look into the problems and proposals affecting health care.

New CME course on ME/CFS

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Challenges in Primary Care, a new online Continuing Medical Education (CME) course, was published by Medscape and the Centers for Disease Control on March 23, 2012. Learn more about the course.

Advocacy Alert - Call for Action FDA Stakeholder Meeting - Deadline is May 2, please act now!

As patients and loved ones, we have suffered too long with too little research, a disbelieving medical community, and no approved drug treatment specifically for ME/CFS. This has to change!...We are calling on the FDA to hold a Stakeholder meeting to discuss approval of ME/CFS treatments. We need the FDA to hear from as many people as possible to ensure that the Stakeholder meeting happens.

President's Letter - Spring 2012

Love and Fatigue in America by Roger King, reviewed by Jean Zimmer

An account of being sick could be a hard sell in today’s book market. If the daily news itself can be a downer, why read a narrative about illness and disability?

Answer: Because fate is fickle. The book’s publication follows closely on the U.S. Supreme Court’s review of President Obama’s healthcare law. King’s well-crafted book raises important questions about how our society treats sick people. What happened to the narrator could happen to anyone. Perhaps the book could help inspire a remedy for a healthcare system that doesn’t seem very caring.

Reporting of Harms Associated with Graded Exercise Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, by Tom Kindlon - This paper reports on the harms often experienced by ME/CFS patients as a result of these therapies, identifies problems with the reporting of harms in previous randomized controlled trials and suggests potential strategies for improvement in the future.

For Health Care Providers – New items have been added to the For Health Care Providers page:

• New online CME course on ME/CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Challenges in Primary Care
• Coanalgesics for Chronic Pain Therapy:  A Narrative Review, by Matthew J. Bair, MD, MS and Tamara R. Sanderson, BS. This is an important review of medications often used for pain control.
• Canadian vs new International Consensus Criteria. This original article compares the 2003 Canadian Case Definition with the new, proposed International Consensus Criteria.
  

The Massachusetts CFIDS/ME & FM Association held its Fall 2011 educational forum, co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Health, on November 5, 2011 at the UMass-Hinton State Laboratory Institute Auditorium in Jamaica Plain, MA.

The meeting was a review of research and other content from the September 2011 International Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome /Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (IACFS/ME) Conference held in Ottawa, Canada. The written summary is in two parts.

Part 1: Dr. Anthony Komaroff’s review of the conference highlights (presented at the meeting on audio, with accompanying slides)

Part 2: Dr. Kenneth Friedman and Dr. Alan Gurwitt spoke about other studies, news and developments.

This conference, sponsored by the International Association for CFS/ME, brought together over 200 clinicians and researchers from 20 countries. The conference was held September 22-25 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Charles Lapp highlights what he found to be most important and interesting of the presentations. Read Dr. Lapp's summary.

Dr. Rosamund Vallings presents a brief summary of every paper presented in the plenary sessions, with a topic index. Read Dr. Vallings' summary.

Dr. Anthony Komaroff presented highlights of the conference from his perspective.  Read a summary.

View videos of the 13 presentations given on the Patient Day.

Read the abstracts of all papers presented at the conference.