Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: controversy, morality and paradox

Contemporary medicine distinguishes between illness and disease. Illness refers to a person's subjective experience of symptoms; disease refers to objective bodily pathology. For many illnesses, medicine has made great progress in finding and treating associated disease. However, not all illnesses are successfully relieved by treating the disease. In some such cases, the patient's suffering can only be reduced by treatment that is focused on the...