Brian Walitt

Brian Walitt, M.D., M.P.H. is a 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."

He is interested in studying "perceptual illness" which he defines as follows:

"In these disorders, a person experiences a range of different bodily sensations, such as pain and fatigue, without any clear external cause. In some, these sensations can be bothersome while in others they can be disabling. The perceptual illnesses that interest me change their names with every generation, with current disorders being called fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Lyme 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

• 2016, NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study
• 2015, Chemobrain: A critical review and causal hypothesis of link between cytokines and epigenetic reprogramming associated with chemotherapy
• 2015, Neuroimaging of Central Sensitivity Syndromes: Key Insights from the Scientific Literature

Talks & interviews

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

Online presence

• PubMed - Brian Walitt
• NIH - Dr Brian Walitt
• Arthritis Research - Brian Walitt

Learn more

• 2016, Brian Walitt’s Radical Bias: Disorders of Subjective Perception, ME/CFS as Normal Life Experience?
• 2015, Prevalence of Fibromyalgia in Elderly Women
• 2012, The Changing Nature of Fibromyalgia Frederick Wolfe and Brian Walitt
• 2009, Fibromyalgia 201

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.