This is why, as someone with a mild case of this illness, I greatly prefer the recently suggested name "Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease". At the very lea

This is why, as someone with a mild case of this illness, I greatly prefer the recently suggested name "Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease". At the very least, it is a more precise description of the most distinctive attribute of the illness: that for someone with it, overexertion causes a particular cluster of symptoms: headache, brain fog, general malaise. (Those symptoms are nonspecific by themselves, of course, but they way they show up after overexertion -- often hours later -- is, AFAIK, unique to this disease. The threshold of overexertion varies from person to person and perhaps even from day to day.) I think you're probably right that there people with other conditions, which present somewhat similarly, who get diagnosed with CFS even though their condition has a different cause from what I have. I'm not even sure that fibromyalgia, often discussed in the same breath with CFS, is the same illness I have (I've never had muscle pain with this). I don't have a problem with doctors saying they don't know what they can do and waiting for more information. It's the ones who can't admit they don't know, and therefore say it must be psychosomatic and should be treated with antidepressants, that I have trouble with. Fortunately my doctor never did that.