ME Awareness Week
As we come to the end of ME Awareness week we have seen many activities and campaigns to raise the profile of ME/CFS as a serious and geniune condition. However I think some of these campaigns need to step back and ask the question ‘what are we trying to get people to be aware of?’
In a reaction to the days of being seen as a psychological issue, most ME Awareness campaigns are attempting to show the conditions as a real physical condition effecting the endocrine, digestion, musculoskeltal systems. However I think that the manner in which some groups have done this is not useful.
There has been several quotes used to describe ME/CFS as as bad a late stage AIDS. Unlike AIDS it is generally not regarded as fatal or even degenerative. While it can be that bad, it most commonly is not.
The flu and bees kill but you wouldn’t call them deadly.
It feels like there has been a drive to misinform people in order to correct historical inacurracies.
The other misinformation is the idea that their is nothing you can do about it. In the push to show ME/CFs as real and physical there is another message that has been lost. There is something you can do about this very real and physcial condition.
People can get stuck in a ‘diagnosis’.