I prefer the umbrella term hypochondria.
I will politely but vehemently disagree with you.
Be careful. I held the same arrogant opinion (and it is an opinion) until an invisible illness took me down. Karma really can be a &*(@!!! Take care.
CFS is real and has a newly-found metabolic signature of relatively high sensitivity and specificity, out of a lab at UC San Diego Medical School:
“Chronic fatigue syndrome is a multisystem disease that causes long-term pain and disability. It is difficult to diagnose because of its protean symptoms and the lack of a diagnostic laboratory test. We report that targeted, broad-spectrum metabolomics of plasma not only revealed a characteristic chemical signature but also revealed an unexpected underlying biology. Metabolomics showed that chronic fatigue syndrome is a highly concerted hypometabolic response to environmental stress that traces to mitochondria and was similar to the classically studied developmental state of dauer. This discovery opens a fresh path for the rational development of new therapeutics and identifies metabolomics as a powerful tool to identify the chemical differences that contribute to health and disease.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/37/E5472.full
I used to laugh at people feigning back problems because there was no physical evidence of disability, until one day I stood up at my computer and down I went.
“I prefer the umbrella term hypochondria.”
Walk a mile in my shoes.
I have lab tests showing four “reactivated viruses” in my system because my ME/CFS has weakened my immune system so much that childhood and young adult viruses that I had contracted and beaten down earlier in my life into recesses in my body have “reactivated.”
I have to take 1500 mg of Valtrex every day to keep my reactivated mononucleosis (HHV-4) from getting out of control and reducing me to a demented state.
Believe me my self-insured Fortune 50 company didn’t pay out $1 million in total cost for me and my wife as my dependent under my corporate long-term disability plan over 16 years after I successfully settled with them out of court for hypochondria.
Nor does the Social Security Admin. pay out $billions every year for ME/CFS, which it does under a recognized code.