Brian Walitt

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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[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."

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." [1]

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.[2] He has stated that fibromyalgia is not a disease but rather a way of "dealing with the difficulties of just being a human.”[3]

In a 2015 paper on chemotherapy related cognitive dysfunction[4] 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[edit | edit source]


Talks & interviews[edit | edit source]

Online presence[edit | edit source]

Learn more[edit | edit source]

See also[edit | edit source]

References[edit | edit source]