Epistemology of the Clinic

Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is often called a contested disease. Although the suffering of people with ME is usually not called into question, at least not explicitly, questions are raised about whether this suffering is best apprehended through a medical lens. Medical professionals in particular often contest claims to the effect that the illness requires biomedical treatment. They regularly assert that no scientific evidence exists to support the claim that it has an organic basis, such that the symptoms are “medically unexplained”. Together with a handful of other illness, it is therefore termed a “disease of unknown aetiology” or “persistent somatic symptoms”. This suggests that their contestation of our disease is of a purely scientific, apolitical kind: it is simply what the evidence indicates. But for more than forty years, study after study has documented immunological, metabolic, neurological, and vascular aberrations in ME, such that the evidence for an organic basis to t...