Get your own Free Home Page
The following replies were published in the Wall Street Journal's Letters to the Editor column on Thursday, January 7, 1999, page A11, in response to "Chronic Disability Payments"
In response to your Dec. 23 editorial "Chronic Disability Payments": Our organization is deeply concerned that yet again you have unjustly depicted patients as demanding, paranoid malingerers looking for a handout. Disability insurance is not a social welfare program, but rather should be viewed as payments made in "good faith" to become available to the payee in time of need.
Should it be considered "extremist" or "fanatical" for these patients to "demand justice" in the form of access to diagnosis, treatment and benefits routinely accorded to other sick people? At this point there is no "high pressure lobbying" on there behalf; in fact, only one organization has a paid lobbyist, who actually does very little.
You concede that "some real disorder" affects CFS patients, but the "not knowing what it is" seems to negate its legitimacy. Historically, diagnoses have been made on sign-symptom complexes. Activists are clearly not "agitating for recognition of their illness," since CFS has been officially recognized since the publication of CDC's case definition in 1988.
While it is well established that psychiatric causes play a role in chronic fatigue, this is not the case with CFS. Unfortunately, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the illness, has repeatedly been confused with "chronic fatigue," the general symptom, which has generated much misinformation. Only a small percentage of patients whose primary complaint is chronic fatigue will fit the CDC's case definition for CFS.
Former Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Philip R. Lee has stated, "although we have not yet been able to fully describe the basis for CFS, nor do we fully understand the mechanisms of CFS, it is very real and it is not a figment of anyone's imagination."
This is the second CFS-related editorial that has referred to Prof. Elaine Showalter to prove its point, rather than the numerous established, well-credentialled authorities on the illness. Indeed, "travesty has replaced science" when English professors promoting pop psychology are viewed as experts, since analysis of medicine requires a scientific background.
JILL McLAUGHLIN
Executive Director
NCF, Inc.
Needham, Mass.
I was an engineer with a job I loved: I was a wife with a husband I loved (and still do); I was a hotline volunteer, a league volleyball player, and I traveled extensively for work and pleasure. I was a happy, active 42-year-old. On March 12, 1993, I woke up with the "flu" and my life has been altered ever since. I have flu-like symptoms continually, mental confusion, memory loss, extreme fatigue, severe headaches, etc. I have been unable to work. This is not depression. Nor is this the portrait of a deadbeat.
KAREN S. EBLE
Huntingdon Valley, Pa.
For people like me, an ex-Navy SEAL forced into early retirement and condemned to spend 20 hours a day in bed, there is no doubt among my doctors that I am sick. The question is, what is this phantom disease with no cause and no cure? Until we come up with an answer, I am stuck with the unfortunate label of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
JOHN A. NASH
Lt. Cmdr., U.S. Navy (retired)
I take from reading your editorial that over the past 15 years about a half-million people have engaged in a conspiracy to have nonexistent (but measurable) ailments and being unable to work for the sole purpose of defrauding Social Security and getting rich off your taxes. The things you newspaper guys come up with.
While there is certainly controversy surrounding CFS and much to be learned about it, the claim that sufferers are simply having "hysteria" does not add up when weighed against the clinical evidence of physical abnormalities. Many diseases were once widely claimed by the medical community to be "mass hysteria" until sufficient research was done to find the real cause.
DON SLEFFEL
Wichita, Kan.
About every two years you run roughly the same sneering editorial on CFIDS, a devastating disease, probably neurological in origin, that has disabled millions of Americans. Why this irrational animus on your part? We need responsible journalism, even from conservative newspapers such as your own, not hysterical, misinformed attacks.
NAOMI WEISSTEIN, PH.D.
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y.
Get your own Free Home Page