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

Talks & interviews

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

Online presence

 * PubMed - Brian Walitt
 * NIH - Dr Brian Walitt