crowquill said: This may make things easier as once we know definitively what each means according to international classification, patients can insist that medical practitioners use the correct terminology for their illness. Click to expand...

I really don't think this will make much of a difference in the short and medium term. In the longer term it might. This is because doctors might code it for ME, but still treat it as CFS. In general doctors don't really care about bureaucratic codes, and such codes do not dictate tests or treatment.In the UK the only way we will see a difference is for NICE to actually treat them differently, at least for the next several years. There is a real risk that ME is coded differently and then treated the same under the assumption this is yet another MUS that is really psychosomatic. This has to be opposed separately from just using ICD codes.In the US the adoption of SEID might do something similar.What is of concern is those patients who do not easily get an ME diagnosis. For example, those who are coded as CFS because no tests are run, under NICE guidelines, and doctors dismiss other symptoms. Or patients who fit many psychiatric diagnoses. One observation that has recently been made by a presenter in another thread, is that even most healthy people can now be diagnosed with a psychatric disorder, the diagnostic categories are that broad.Also of concern is any patient who has some kind of fatigue syndrome other than ME. With prevailing attitudes they will still be as vulnerable to a psych diagnosis as they are now.ICD and DSM are just bureaucratic codes, and its long been recognized they have little scientific or clinical validity. They are reporting codes.Yet there is a public relations value here, especially if advocacy uses this carefully. However we have to wait for finalization of the ICD before we can do anything.It will also not prevent some psychiatrists from rediagnosing patients. If they decide somatoform disorder, or one of the modern equivalents, is more appropriate, then there will still be issues. This already happens as they ignore existing ICD codes entirely (aside from coding forms), which is pretty well what many doctors do, if not most of them.What might be of value in the medium to long term is that there will be increased legitimacy of grant applications only using an ME diagnosis, which might result in studies with more homogeneous cohorts.