Opinion: Delay of British chronic fatigue syndrome guidelines are a setback for people with long Covid
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a British agency charged with developing clinical guidelines for medical conditions, was expected to release new recommendations on August 18 for the treatment of people with chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS. Instead, it abruptly delayed the move under pressure from powerful medical interests.
The new guidelines would have represented NICE’s official retraction of a highly flawed version published in 2007. Back then, NICE endorsed two interventions that were supposedly able to cure ME/CFS — cognitive behavior therapy and a program of steady increases in exercise, called graded exercise therapy. These recommendations, however, were based on misguided hypotheses and research of questionable quality, and people with the disease often found these therapies to be ineffective, and even harmful.
