Fact Sheet 3: ME/CFS: Information for Medical Professionals

STAT

Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine

The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have ...

Jason Crawford on Twitter / X

It's hard to find information that all the world's top scientists and doctors have missed.But it's not that hard, if you're intelligent, thoughtful, and diligent, to find information that the medical system has not yet caught up to—information that is not yet incorporated into… pic.twitter.com/HrgGzCUdX2— Jason Crawford (@jasoncrawford) September 22, 2024

AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers

Analysis flags hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.

Doctors’ AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong, NHS watchdog warns

Exclusive: Patients identify errors in consultation transcripts that are missed by GPs, Healthwatch England finds

OpenMD Medical Reference

Medical reference platform and search engine indexing billions of documents from government agencies, global health organizations, and medical journals.

Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice

Exclusive: Inaccurate information presented in summaries, Guardian investigation finds

Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice

Meta’s Muse Spark model offers to analyze users’ health data, including lab results. Beyond the obvious privacy risks, it’s not a capable stand-in for a real doctor.

Qualitative research: standards, challenges, and guidelines

Qualitative research methods could help us to improve our understanding of medicine. Rather than thinking of qualitative and quantitative strategies as incompatible, they should be seen as complementary. Although procedures for textual interpretation differ from those of statistical analysis, because of the different type of data used and questions to be answered, the underlying principles are much the same. In this article I propose relevance, validity, and reflexivity as overall standards for qualitative inquiry.

QBank.study

Decentralized medical flashcards, MCQs, and tests on the AT Protocol.

Preparing Physicians for the Clinical Algorithm Era

The U.S. government recently took steps to ensure that clinical decision support algorithms are safe for clinical use. The next and larger step will be teaching physicians how to use the algorithms ...

Preparing Physicians for the Clinical Algorithm Era

The U.S. government recently took steps to ensure that clinical decision support algorithms are safe for clinical use. The next and larger step will be teaching physicians how to use the algorithms ...

Read the docs like a book - Aaron Francis

Reading the docs straight through, like a book, can provide outsized benefits for your career.

Patient-reported treatment outcomes in ME/CFS and long COVID

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and long COVID are persistent multisystem illnesses affecting many patients. With no known effective FDA-approved treatments for either condition, patient-reported outcomes of treatments may prove helpful in identifying management strategies that can improve patient care and generate new avenues for research. Here, we present the results of an ME/CFS and long COVID treatment survey with responses from 3,925 patients. We assess the experiences of these patients with more than 150 treatments in conjunction with their demographics, symptoms, and comorbidities. Treatments with the greatest perceived benefits are identified. Patients with each condition who participated in the study shared similar symptom profiles, including all the core symptoms of ME/CFS, e.g., 89.7% of ME/CFS and 79.4% of long COVID reported postexertional malaise (PEM). Furthermore, treatment responses between these two patient groups were significantly correlated (R 2 = 0.68). Patient subgroups, characterized by distinct symptom profiles and comorbidities, exhibited increased responses to specific treatments, e.g., a POTS-dominant cluster benefiting from autonomic modulators and a cognitive-dysfunction cluster from CNS stimulants. This study underscores the symptomatic and therapeutic similarities between ME/CFS and long COVID and highlights the commonalities and nuanced complexities of infection-associated chronic diseases and related conditions. While this study does not provide recommendations for specific therapies, in the absence of approved treatments, insights from patient-reported experiences provide urgently needed real-world evidence for developing targeted patient care therapies and future clinical trials.