NOT ONLY REAL, BUT PHYSICAL

It was with considerable anger that I read the ridiculously biased and insulting review by Imogen Evans of Hillary Johnson’s book “Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic” (April 7). As the husband of a woman who has chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), I can’t begin to tell you the potential damage Evans did with her words. When I finally think society is becoming enlightened enough to understand this disease, Evans throws us back to the Dark Ages with her implied criticism that “to Johnson, a psychosomatic view of chronic fatigue is intolerable.”

Has the reviewer ever gone from doctor to doctor to doctor, too sick to work and be an active member of society, only to be told that there is nothing wrong with her? My wife and I struggled for years, trying new doctors, only to be eventually “fired” when whatever treatment they would prescribe didn’t work. Of course, it was never the medical profession’s fault--only the patient’s.

Fortunately, due to our persistence, we were finally able to find some physicians who were true scientists--they refrained from making judgments until they had listened for quite some time to my wife’s history. They were university research doctors and family practitioners excellent enough to perform the proper tests that confirmed her severely compromised immune deficiency. One such doctor, a professor of infectious diseases at a major university and respected AIDS researcher, was then able to enroll her in a federally funded clinical trial to use the drug alpha interferon. This turned out to be the first hopeful treatment she’d had in seven years.

In essence, my wife was suffering from a physical, not a psychological disease. There is no “controversy” over this--it is a provable fact--but how would we have discovered it if we had accepted a psychological diagnosis?

The reviewer does a disservice by completely failing to mention the several provable diagnostic methods that demonstrate that CFS is an immune dysfunction disease. The tone of the review indicates that Evans appears to have more of a personal ax to grind with the author. It seems she has allowed her opinion that it was somehow wrong for Johnson to sympathize with the sufferers of CFS to cause her to further stigmatize the patients as sufferers of a psychological disorder that they should be satisfied is as “real” as a physical disorder. So little of the review was actually descriptive of the book’s factual content that it really amounted to more of a personality clash than a legitimate review.

JERALD C. DUFRESNE DUNN, CORONA