[GoodOldNe]

This is Sick-Tok's greatest hits. I am a former special education teacher and current emergency medicine physician and have tremendous compassion for those who are truly dealing with life-limiting conditions like ASD and real EDS (the kind that causes aortic dissections among other very serious kinds of pathology). I simultaneously have compassion for those who are suffering physically and psychically and who want an explanation and a label and for some reason find their way towards wanting to identify as chronically ill / disabled.

It's a tough thing but from what I have seen, pursuing the diagnoses on this list makes life worse for the vast majority of people who choose to do so. There is a rapidly expanding cottage industry of charlatans who will diagnose and treat these things, and others who post about them online and feed the cycle. I'll admit spectrum bias, since I see the ones who come to the ER with concern about these issues and they skew hard in a certain direction but this is overall not a good thing.

[DANmode]

Until you and your colleagues derive the root cause of an individual’s chronic suffering (or the patient jumps ship and has naturopathy do so), then they are chronically ill or disabled.

They don’t want to be: most just want to be recognized as what they are long enough to find the path out. or any optimization.