Alan Levinovitz

And often those accusations even extend so far as to say that they're malingering or faking.

So millions of people who are extremely sick have been told this.

And what I was trying to explore in the WIRED piece was how that patient advocacy community has become extremely powerful and, in my opinion, captured largely the journalistic and scientific establishment when it comes to reporting on and researching this condition.

And it's more true in the United States.

There's a little bit less of that capture in Europe.

But overall, I think it's a pretty safe statement.

And what that boils down to is this.

There is an insistence that anything that involves the brain or nervous system

needs to be kind of bracketed unless it's attached to a biological explanation.

And the reason for that is that biology is seen as legitimizing, whereas psychology or the brain or mind is seen as delegitimizing or gaslighting or blaming the patient.

Yeah, and what I try to point out in the article is that there's pretty good evidence, or at least some promising evidence, that some people's recoveries have to do with their ability to calm their nervous system.

And that nervous system dysregulation seems like, at least in some people, to be a promising avenue for healing.

And also...

that the absence of any clear biomarkers after over $2 billion and five years of research into this condition tells us it's likely that the dysfunction is happening somewhere that's difficult to study.

Hardest part of the human to study is the brain and the nervous system.

So I think there's certainly a lot of evidence that points to this area as promising research, but as the backlash illustrates,

It's very difficult to talk about it without falling back into a kind of, it's all in your head, it's wrong beliefs, this is psychogenic, it's psychosomatic, it's your fault, your malingering sort of narrative.

So throughout my whole career, which goes back more than a decade, what I've really been interested in is how... You say religion, but actually my area of background is classical Chinese thought.

I happen to... You can only study classical Chinese thought in religion departments typically, with some exceptions, Michigan and Hawaii.

So what I'm really interested in is how metaphysics, I guess you could say, shapes our reality, shapes our perception of reality, shapes our beliefs about ourselves, and especially health and science.