“The main reason that decision theorists study simple gambles is that this is what other decision theorists do.”

– Daniel Kahneman

All diagnoses are clinical. Despite late modern efforts to systemize medicine as an industrial or IT product, medicine remains a living, evolving art that engages body, being, becoming, and doing. Rigorous thinking is helpful in this process—information overload, metrics, and centralized control are not.

Diagnoses that late modern doctors disparage as “clinical” are frowned on by the system because they don’t stand up in court or in the systems of third-party payers without technological bolstering. They are not second-rate; they are in development. They cannot be rushed. All doctors depend on age-old processes to define a clinical pathophysiology that serves as a gold standard. When doctors say they can’t find anything wrong, it’s because they have no idea what is going on and—thanks to modern systems—have no time to puzzle it out. They may even lack the skills to solve the puzzle.

Fortunately for you, I had the misfortune to develop ME and the skills to solve the puzzle by studying my own case. The result is a new diagnosis that I call Alderman syndrome or chronic ambient poisoning. The genesis is so ubiquitous and so easily modified by other factors—such as liver enzymes—as to make modern methods useless. It is most reasonable to view this disorder as a disease of your habitats, and to consider each individual case to be unique until proven otherwise by an N-of-1 sequential elimination trial of potential causes.

Contributing factors include toxic pollutants taken in food or otherwise ingested, inhaled, or absorbed, as well as human-generated electromagnetic fields that disrupt living processes. It is not realistic to expect to assess cumulative lifetime exposure to chemicals of any kind, much less to assess non-ionizing radiation poisoning at any point in time. It is difficult to visualize the sources.The only thing you can do as a patient with chronic exposure is embark on a course of discovery with the aid of a physician who is willing and able to learn with you.

Until doctors have a chance to do the clinical science that has been squeezed out of patient care in the US, the National Academy of Medicine criteria are the best guideline for clinical diagnosis of ME/CFS, MCS, FM, EHS, degenerative neurological conditions, neurotoxicity, ‘Lyme disease’, and the like.