Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is the name currently used by the majority of the medical and scientific community to describe a condition or set of conditions characterized by fatigue and other symptoms. The term is contested, mostly by patients and patient advocacy groups, but also by some doctors. Several of the more common alternative names used to describe what most believe to be the same condition or subtypes include myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), and post-viral fatigue syndrome (PVFS).
In 1959, E.D. Acheson an early investigator of benign myalgic encephalomyelitis, wrote: "The wisdom of naming a disorder, the nature of which cannot at present be proved, and which may be due to more than one agent, is debatable." The name used to label the condition (or set of conditions) is one of several controversies related to CFS.
Famous quotes containing the words alternative, names, chronic, fatigue and/or syndrome:
“If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Ants are the only creatures on earth, other than man, who make war. They campaign, they are chronic aggressors, and they make slave laborers of the captives they don’t kill.”
—Ted Sherdeman, and Gordon Douglas. Dr. Medford (Edmund Gwenn)
“Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)