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[edit | edit source]
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[edit | edit source]
Walitt believes that fibromyalgia is a "psychosomatic experience," a variant of normal, and not an abnormal disease state that should be medicalized.[1] He has stated that fibromyalgia is not a disease but rather a way of "dealing with the difficulties of just being a human.”[2]
In a 2015 paper on chemotherapy related cognitive dysfunction[3] 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...".