Top ME/CFS Experts Cooperate on Treatment Guidelines

The good news in ME/CFS just keeps coming! This time, it's not in the realm of research, but the all-important topic of treatment. Many patients know that the only way to get complete and comprehensive medical treatments for ME/CFS is to see one of the U.S.'s few top experts. Now, those experts are coming together to document their expertise into treatment guidelines for primary care physicians and family doctors. Hurray!

This excellent article published on Medscape by medical journalist Miriam E. Tucker summarizes the first meeting of this esteemed group, a summit organized by Lucinda Bateman (one of those few top experts). This meeting was just the first step, but information from the group is already useful for doctors unfamiliar with ME/CFS and how to treat it.

From Dr. Bateman's own website, this is a summary of the meeting itself and which doctors attended - it's a Who's Who of top ME/CFS clinicians.

You don't have to wait for the final guidelines to be produced to begin to take action to educate your own doctor(s) and find effective treatments. Print the Medscape article and share it with your doctor - that alone will verify the severity and scientific underpinnings of our disease and begin to give them some ideas of what tests to run and the kinds of treatments that might be helpful to patients.

Here are some other recent documents that I've shared here on the blog previously that would also be great for printing and sharing with your doctor:

• ME/CFS Pediatric Primer on Diagnosis and Treatment - written for the treatment of young people but applicable to adults, too.
• ME/CFS: What Every Family Physician Needs to Know - a recent article that explains what is known about the science behind ME/CFS, with a brief mention of potential treatments (starts on page 23 of the pdf).

And if your doctor isn't interested in learning more about ME/CFS and won't read an article about it? Then, you need a new doctor. You don't necessarily need an expert - just someone who is open-minded and willing to listen and learn.