Congress has a plan to help people with chronic fatigue syndrome. It needs to fund it.

I spent the following years doing what I was trained to do: gathering evidence, following data, advocating for structural change. As a sociologist at the University of Maine, I studied how institutions fail people. The National Institutes of Health ME/CFS Research Roadmap, approved in 2024, lays out exactly what needs to happen: biomarker discovery, a validated diagnostic test, and clinical trials for treatments. People with ME/CFS are being failed by a federal research investment that has, for decades, amounted to a fraction of what the disease demands. They are Maine workers, Maine families, Maine neighbors who got sick and were told their disease was not real enough.