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cjbgkaghyesterday at 4:32 PM0 repliesview on HN

Unless you’ve had ME/CFS you cannot understand how bad it is, I’ve had it and I still have a hard time comprehending how bad it was, I am occasionally reminded and it’s easy to forget. While it won’t kill you it’ll destroy your life until you’re ready to kill yourself.

The UK led the world with explicit psychologizing of it in large part to prevent insurance companies being liable for such an expensive and debilitating condition. A legacy that continues to this day, the main people responsible are still very influential. Fauci was instrumental in diverting research away from the autoimmune aspect and preventing a lot of important research. The $1B set aside for LongCovid appears to largely have been wasted. The official classification for hEDS was explicitly changed to reduce the number found so that it could remain a rare disease and continue to have access to specific funding for rare diseases (goal seeking). I could go on and on. It is a highly dysfunctional industry with many perverse incentives pulling it in all sorts of directions. There was the healthy at any size movement despite obesity being a massive cause for mortality, perhaps the only stronger signal would be smoking and consider how long it took them to figure out smoking.

There have been insanely impressive improvements to medical science but this seems to be largely due to tooling and access to information rather than the lumbering bureaucracy which appears to do very little of benefit.