CFS Related Death Makes Headlines

From this weeks New Scientist Magazine:

Chronic fatigue syndrome has been given as an official cause of death – apparently for the first time in the world.

On Tuesday, coroner Veronica Hamilton-Deeley of Brighton and Hove Coroners Court, UK, recorded the cause of death of a 32-year-old woman as acute aneuric renal failure (failure to produce urine) due to dehydration as a result of CFS. The deceased woman, Sophia Mirza, had suffered from CFS for six years.

CFS, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), has a variety of devastating symptoms ranging from extreme weakness, inability to concentrate and persistent headache. Sufferers can have the disease for years, but its cause remains controversial, with fiercely opposing views from psychiatrists on one side and biologically minded physicians on the other.

read the full story here

In my opinion, human experience should always come before intellectual wrangling. What right does any one human being have over another to declare the nature of their experience? That biology is arguing with psychology is a waste of resource, when both should be united in earnestly looking into what they can do together to listen to ME, CFS and Fibromyalgia sufferers and really look at what’s going on in their bodies.

It’s a tragedy that the disregard for real suffering is such that a mother who just lost her daughter to CFS related death is on record as saying:  “I’m extremely pleased that CFS/ME was identified on the death certificate as one of the primary causes of Sophia’s death,” she says, “because this can be used to reinforce the need for biomedical research into the disease.”
Wake up people of the medical world! This problem is real and it’s not going away.

Tomorrow I’ll be back on the detox trail… with Part 4 of our mini-series on Detox & Fatigue

Technorati Tags: CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, fatigue, health press, ME, syndrome