General practitioners' perceptions of chronic fatigue syndrome and beliefs about its management, compared with irritable bowel syndrome: qualitative study

Professor Leonard Jasons DePaul University study of medical students
attributions of illness severity corresponding to different illness names
for the same symptom set indicates that selection of illness names does
indeed influence the perceptions of practitioners.
http://www.cfids.org/archives/1999/1999-4-article04.asp
This is taken as evidence of the necessity to abandon the trivializing
"CFS" in order to induce a serious response from physicians.
Many CFS patients in the USA had hoped that the medical name of Myalgic
Encephalomyelitis would inspire the appropriate response from doctors as
it had induced a more serious illness attribution in Prof. Jasons study.
The difficulties ME patients are having indicates that even this "serious
sounding medical name" has not had the desired effect.
The variability in the medical students response to the same illness
presentation described in Prof. Jasons study and the general practitioners
psychological misperceptions of IBS, which are only now being corrected,
point to the source of the more fundamental problem; General
Practitioners are influenced more by belief systems than symptoms. If the
medical students in Prof. Jasons study assessed severity according to the
illness presentation rather than correlating the severity to the name, the
symptoms presented under the different names should have resulted in the
same diagnosis. While I agree that changing to a more "serious sounding
medical name" may indeed influence suggestible doctors, I would like to
point out that people seeking the cause of their pain don't bring medical
names along to convince the doctors of the illness severity - they bring
their symptoms. If the physicians were responding in an objective manner
to the illness presentation, the name should not have made a difference.

-Erik Johnson

Competing interests:
None declared