Chronic fatigue in children: illness or disease?

To the Editor.— Recently, Van Aerde1 strongly criticized the study by Smith and colleagues2 on grounds that the authors confused the symptom "chronic fatigue" with "chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)," because many of their patients failed to meet published criteria3 for CFS. In this regard, it is useful to differentiate "illness" from "disease," as recently done by Green and Stuy.4 "Illness" can be viewed as a disvalued change that occurs in a person's state of being, whereas "disease" more specifically refers to a detrimental series of biological or pathogenetic events.

• Publication year

  1993

• Venue

  Pediatrics

• Publication date

  1993-01-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1542/peds.91.1.163PMID 8416493
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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