“Chronic Fatigue Disorder research finds genetic factors”; yippee!
Aug 14, 2025
∙ Paid
I bring up this recent study to show you how the (con) game is played.
The UK researchers examined two groups of people, totaling thousands. One group had been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Disorder, the other group not.
Genetic differences were found in the two groups.
“Promising.” “A step forward.”
Well, wait. The genetic differences involved 8 regions of the genome. The Chronic Fatigue group was different from the other group in 8 regions. Doesn’t sound very precise, does it? Because it isn’t. It’s exceedingly vague.
But the researchers pressed on. Within the 8 genomic regions of the Chronic Fatigue people, they identified 43 genes of interest, and 29 of those looked “especially promising.”
Therefore, maybe the Chronic Fatigue people are distinguished from the other group by some sort of abnormal activity in 29 genes. TWENTY-NINE.
Maybe.
I think I could perform that study in my backyard throwing rocks at a big board painted with a few thousand genes represented by circles and squares.
And then I would say, “You see, the non-Chronic Fatigue group doesn’t have all those 29 genes possibly sort of misfiring. Voila!”
There’s more.
Chronic Fatigue has been labeled a Disorder, a disease, a condition. It isn’t any of those. Because there is no defining diagnostic test for it.
It’s a bunch of symptoms clumped together by researchers.
Yes, people are fatigued. Some of them are debilitated. But no one can claim they’re all debilitated for the same reason. Some people could be debilitated because they’ve been working for the government for 20 years.
Hey, a study of chronically bored government workers could show they (possibly, sort of) have abnormal activity in 357 genes.
And finally, the recent UK study offers no treatment targeting those 29 might-be-misbehaving genes. If you have a hypothesis but you can’t do anything useful with it, you just have a speculation.
I have speculated that non-human beings aboard a sea ship on Saturn are responsible for sniffles in Dallas. But most of the time, I keep it to myself.
Genes-this, genes-that: