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Stigma and discrimination
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===Researchers with ME/CFS: stigma from academic colleagues === Scientists who work on [[biomedical research]] or treat patients outside of the psychiatry and exercise focused [[biopsychosocial model]] (BPS) have been denied work in their country's public health care system, portrayed as quacks, anti-science, struggled to get research funding or lab time and been isolated and ostracized by their peers.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":5">{{Cite journal | last = Maes | first = Michael | authorlink = Michael Maes | last2 = Mihaylova | first2 = Ivana | authorlink2 = Ivana Mihaylova | last3 = Bosmans | first3=Eugene | authorlink3 = Eugene Bosmans | authorlink4 = | authorlink5 = | date = August 2007 | title = Not in the mind of neurasthenic lazybones but in the cell nucleus: patients with chronic fatigue syndrome have increased production of nuclear factor kappa beta|url=http://www.nel.edu/userfiles/articlesnew/NEL280407A15.pdf|journal=Neuro Endocrinology Letters|volume=28|issue=4|pages=456–462|issn=0172-780X|pmid=17693979|quote=For decades, CFS patients were (and still are) dismissed as lazybones or hypochondriacs. Since 1994, the baffling illness has received recognition by the introduction of diagnostic criteria [1]. Nevertheless, many medical doctors and insurance companies still assert that CFS merely is a mental condition. <br >Doctors who treat CFS patients as suffering from a biological disorder and scientists who deal with the psycho-neuro-immune pathophysiology of CFS are often considered quacks by some of their colleagues, insurance companies and anti-quack societies, which are sometimes officially supported by governments, e.g. the Dutch government, in order to eliminate the scientific view that CFS is an organic disorder. The latter obviously would mean that the national health care system is obliged to financially support those patients who now are considered hypochondriacs and thus are suspended from the national health care systems. In accordance, the mainstream, “evidence based” treatment for CFS is cognitive behavioural therapy, which means that patients with CFS are being treated as having a mental illness with “treatments” that do not treat any underlying pathophysiology. <br>There is, however, evidence that CFS is accompanied by severe immune disorders, such as activation of the inflammatory response system (IRS) and increased oxidative and nitrosative stress with a significant damage to membrane lipids and functional proteins [2–4].|via=}}</ref> Doctors, researchers and other health professionals who have called for controversial research or review articles to be retracted (withdrawn) on the grounds of not meeting adequate scientific standards have been labeled "activists" regardless of the scientific reasons they gave, the field they work in or their personal history. Professors at medical schools report that they have been instructed by their department chairs to stop seeing ME/CFS patients, have been denied promotions due to their ME/CFS research, have received unfounded letters of reprimand, and have been subjected to ethics investigations for using their medical school email and other medical school resources to investigate ME/CFS.<ref name=":10">{{Cite web|url=http://immunedysfunction.org/images/Elephants%20in%20the%20Room%20As%20Delivered.pdf | title = Elephants in the room | last = Friedman | first = Kenneth | authorlink = Kenneth Friedman | date = |website=|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=March 4, 2019}}</ref> A charity offered to donate a scholarship to a medical school, to benefit medical students who study ME/CFS, but the medical school refused the donation because "ME-CFS patients set up an artificial distinction between psychiatric and organic illness, and the school does not wish its students exposed to patients who make such a distinction."<ref name=":10" />
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