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by wizzwizz4 189 days ago
In the limit, there's no difference between a scientific fact and an unfalsified hypothesis. I'm not aware of anyone falsifying this one, and it's over five years old, so I'm going to say "scientific fact".

At this point, even if it is falsified, that falsification will probably take the form "here is an exception to the general rule", like how we still use Newton's law of gravitation even though it was falsified by Urbain Le Verrier's 1859 observations of Mercury.
1 comments
amelius 189 days ago
If a hypothesis has not been falsified that does not mean there is consensus around it in the scientific community.

Your statement can also be applied to the inverse of the hypothesis, after all.

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wizzwizz4 189 days ago
I'll put it another way: long COVID has been studied quite a lot over the past 5 years, and I'm not aware of anyone being able to distinguish it from ME/CFS (except by definition). People appear to have stopped trying to draw a distinction, by and large, in favour of trying to identify better category boundaries to use instead. See https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines13112797 for a Nov 2025 literature review, which basically says "except for long COVID being caused by SARS-CoV-2, it's very difficult to tell ME/CFS-like long COVID and ME/CFS apart" in excruciating detail. Some things have been found to occur in long COVID but not found to occur in ME/CFS, and vice versa, but afaik there's nothing found to occur in ME/CFS-like long COVID that's been found to not occur in ME/CFS.

(Technically, long COVID is a broader diagnosis, encompassing some long-term conditions caused by a COVID-19 infection that are distinct from ME/CFS, but I consider that a "by definition" distinction rather than anything real. This is what you'd expect if ME/CFS had multiple causes, and COVID-19 infection could cause multiple chronic conditions, and most long COVID is actually ME/CFS.)

The ME Association came to this conclusion a couple of years ago: https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co...

> The ME Association (MEA) takes the view that Long Covid and ME/CFS are both examples of a serious and debilitating condition that can follow any type of viral infection.

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