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.

Controversy

Walitt believes that Fibromyalgia is a psychosomatic experience, a variant of normal, and not an abnormal disease state that should be medicalized. 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

Online presence

• PubMed - Brian Walitt
• NIH - Dr 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.

cognition Thought processes, including attention, reasoning, and memory.

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.