Phoenix rising forum post, by HIP, January 2016: Why so little ME/CFS research from France and Germany?
There seems to be little ME/CFS research done in France and Germany, relative to their overall scientific output. Why is this?
Using a rough method, I found that the number of ME/CFS scientific research papers published by each country is the following:
France and Germany, along with the UK, are the leading countries in Europe in terms of publishing scientific papers. Yet Germany and France seem to have published very few ME/CFS papers. In fact Norway, a country of just 5 million inhabitants, has produced more ME/CFS papers than France or Germany.
I wonder why this is. Moreover, shouldn’t ME/CFS patients in France and Germany be advocating for more ME/CFS research? These countries are leading forces in science and technology, so it would be good to have them onboard.
The following diagram shows the number of scientific papers (of any sort) published by different countries around the world. As you can see, France and Germany are leading nations in terms of their overall scientific output. Yet they do very little ME/CFS research…
I just modified the search parameters to exclude any UK papers containing the phrases “graded exercise” and “cognitive behavioural therapy”, and with these GET/CBT papers excluded, it brings the UK total number of ME/CFS papers down from 595 to 480.
Similarly for the Netherlands, another country with a lots of psychobabble ME/CFS research, modifying the search to exclude GET/CBT brings to the total number of Dutch ME/CFS papers down from 173 to 112.
