Brian Walitt

Doctor Brian Walitt is a pain researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and oversees intramural clinical protocols. He is the lead clinical investigator of the NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study.

Research

Dr. Walitt's self-stated research interests include "Pain and related interoceptive disorders (i.e. fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue)" and "Social construction of illness and disease."

Controversy

Walitt believes that fibromyalgia is a "psychosomatic experience," a variant of normal, and not an abnormal disease state that should be medicalized. He has stated that fibromyalgia is not a disease but rather a way of "dealing with the difficulties of just being a human.”

In a 2015 paper on chemotherapy related cognitive dysfunction co-authored by Walitt, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome are referred to as somatoform illnesses, with their hallmark being a "...discordance between the severity of subjective experience and that of objective impairment...".

Notable studies

• NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study
• 2015, Chemobrain: A critical review and causal hypothesis of link between cytokines and epigenetic reprogramming associated with chemotherapy

Talks & interviews

• 2015, VIDEO: Fibromyalgia doesn’t fit the disease model (there is a transcript)

Online presence

• PubMed - Brian Walitt
• NIH - Dr Brian Walitt

Learn more

• 2012, The Changing Nature of Fibromyalgia Frederick Wolfe and Brian Walitt

See also

• Avindra Nath

National Institutes of Health (NIH) - A set of biomedical research institutes operated by the U.S. government, under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services.

somatic symptom disorder A psychiatric term to describe an alleged condition whereby a person's thoughts somehow cause physical symptoms. The actual existence of such a condition is highly controversial, due to a lack of scientific evidence. It is related to other psychiatric terms, such as "psychosomatic", "neurasthenia", and "hysteria". Older terms include "somatization", "somatoform disorder", and "conversion disorder". Such terms refer to a scientifically-unsupported theory that claims that a wide range of physical symptoms can be created by the human mind, a theory which has been criticized as "mind over matter" parapsychology, a pseudoscience.