http://constantfuckingshit.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/webinars-by-prof-leonard-jason/
Three web seminars by Prof Leonard Jason, Director of the Center for Community Research at DePaul University, Chicago are now available to view, hosted by the active Dutch organisation
ME/CVS Vereniging. These talks are produced under the auspices of ‘Science to Patients’, which is a Dutch government subsidized project, in which the gap between medical science and patients is bridged by inviting scientists to deliver short webinars on topics of concern to patients.
In the first,
‘Introduction; Experience with ME’, Prof Jason introduces his own research journey into the field, which has culminated in a range of key studies. As he says, “one of the important things that we learned was that not less than a million people had this illness, rather than the 20,000 which were estimated. So it wasn’t really a rare disorder….”. (Read the transcript
Prof. Jason. Introduction; Experience with ME).
In the second,
‘Criteria and diagnosis; Part 1’, he talks about the definitional and diagnostic issues surrounding ME/CFS; why the name CFS trivialises this illness; and some of his efforts to throw light on these matters. As he says, “The British started calling this illness ME many years ago and there’s been a regression back to CFS in 1988 through the CDC in the USA. I think there’s been a movement to change that, and actually some people are calling it ME/CFS as a transition term…” (Read the transcript
Prof. Jason. Criteria and diagnosis; Part 1).
In the third, ‘
Criteria and diagnosis; Part 2‘ he discusses the reasons for the stigma surrounding ME/CFS, practical problems with the diagnosis, and his use of the DePaul Symptom Questionnaire (see ‘Further Reading’ below) which “gives us the ability to…focus on people in terms of how many symptoms they might have for the critical case definitions”. Read the transcript
Prof. Jason. Criteria and diagnosis; Part 2).
