#5 How our understanding of ME/CFS, fatigue and pain has progressed over the past decade with Lucinda Bateman M.D.

Lucinda Bateman, M.D. has been seeing patients, learning about, and educating about ME/CFS and fibromyalgia for decades. She is Chief Medical Officer of the Bateman Horne Center, Salt Lake City, whose mission is “improving access to informed health care for individuals with ME/CFS, Long COVID, and fibromyalgia by translating clinical expertise into medical education and research initiatives”.

Dr. Bateman was one of the researchers responsible for the National Academy of Medicine’s 2015 report on ME/CFS, a seminal paper that helped define the diagnostic criteria for ME / CFS.  Since then she has authored innumerable papers, working with the CDC alongside many of the stalwarts of the chronic illness medical community as part of the longitudinal multi-centre (MCAM) research that has looked at the impact, treatment protocols and drivers of ME/CFS.

A member of the ME/CFS Clinican Coalition, she is dedicated to advancing understanding of these chronic conditions and improving care and outcomes for patients.  Her work has found many benefits from treating co-morbidities in chronic illness, such as POTS, with her most recent publication addressing chronic overlapping pain conditions, including fibromyaligia, that are regularly found alongside ME/CFS.

And since the inception of Long Covid her work has pivoted to include this new heterogenious group of post-infection patients.  Much of her recent work has been looking at the parallels and differences between these illnesses and applying her historic knowledge to this new disease: she is one of the ME/CFS and Long Covid specialists working with the NIH on the RECOVER program. And her deep understanding of post- exertional malaise once again highlights the importance of pacing across these conditions

Her work over the decades has been tireless to developing understanding of, and treatment paradigms for, chronic post-infectious syndromes.