White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Underwear Goes on the Outside for Charity

April 28, 2016 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

Ronald Davis is a respected professor of biochemistry and genetics at Stanford University, and director of its Genome Technology Center. So why is a picture of him wearing his underwear over his pants superhero-style circulating on social media?

Davis is not alone. Others are joining in making themselves look ridiculous every day.

Ron Davis, ME Undies Challenge

Looking silly for a serious cause

The answer is that Davis is a research scientist whose son is severely afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), better known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — a name that dismisses the severity of this little understood and understudied disease that has devastated the lives of perhaps 1 million Americans, and what are calculated to be 17 million people worldwide.

Taking a selfie with underwear worn over outerwear is a new campaign, “Undies on the Outside,” to raise money — desperately needed money — for research on ME. This money possibly should have come through the government years ago, but the principal medical research arm of the United States, the National Institutes of Health, has been parsimonious in funding ME down through the years. Only $5 million a year is devoted to the affliction.

Yet the sick are almost inevitably sentenced to a lifetime of unspeakable suffering — often being confined to bed for months at a time and sometimes years — in pain and hideous isolation. They tell their story on ME/CFSAlert, the YouTube channel that I co-founded.

ME is an equal-opportunity monster: It strikes all ages and both sexes. Dr. Jose Montoya of the Stanford University Medical Center describes it as ordering a “parallel life.”

One of my close friends, who has suffered from the disease for 25 years, is fairly typical in her adversity. She was an athletic woman with a passion for squash and cycling. She said that when she was afflicted she became “like a car that had run out of gas.” That was on good days.

My friend’s life went from one of accomplishment and fullness in all the ways that a life can go right to one of surviving on the margins. For two years, she was bedridden. Every type of exertion is followed by a kind of unreasonable punishment for just trying to be normal. Recently, we spent a few hours together and had lunch in a restaurant. The price she paid was being so sick for two days that she had to stay in bed.

Normal family life, work and simple enjoyments are prescribed by ME. I have been writing and broadcasting about it for five years, during which I have come to think of those who suffer day in and day out, essentially without hope, as the children of a lesser god, alive but denied the joys of being alive. Suicide rates are high, and my e-mail box is full of e-mails from people who say they wish they could die.

Symptoms vary from a patient who told me her limbs seemed to be exploding to many who suffer mental fog, known as dysphasia, and need hours to write a few simple sentences.

ME Undies Challenge Logo

The “Undies on the Outside” challenge was devised by an Australian woman. It came from a party game of residents at cheetah rescue center in South Africa, who relieved the tedium of an evening by dressing up with their underwear over their outerwear. Years later one of those revelers, Kate Booker, now living in London, suffering from ME for 18 years, and bitterly aware of the paucity of funding globally for the disease, was inspired to work up a challenge to raise money.

Everyone photographed wearing their undies over their clothes is sending $10 to the Open Medicine Foundation in the Los Angeles area, and challenging three other people to do likewise. Booker chose the foundation because it is raising money for pure research into ME and is concentrating initially on finding a biomarker, so that people can be diagnosed and not thrown into medical limbo.

The Open Medicine Foundation is run by Linda Tannenbaum, whose adult daughter has been afflicted since she was a teenager.

It is especially sad that this disease seems only to be known and understood by those who have a family member or close friend who has been, as it were, taken from them while still being there, shuttered away in plain sight. — For InsideSources

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dr. Jose Montoya, Kate Booker, Linda Tannenbaum, ME, ME/CFS Alert, myalgic encephalomyelitis, Open Medicine Foundation, Ronald W. Davis, Stanford University, Stanford University Medical Center, Undies on the Outside

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Alternative Energy Hailed as a Megatrend, Disrupting World Order

Alternative Energy Hailed as a Megatrend, Disrupting World Order

Llewellyn King

Glance up and around and you’ll know the horizon is changing. From Canada to South Africa, Brazil to China, windmills and solar panels are telling a story of change. In the United States, the landscape is collecting a kind of 21st-century raiment. Wind farms, solar farms, and just stray windmills and solar panels on roofs […]

The Great American Reset Is Underway and Will Change Everything

The Great American Reset Is Underway and Will Change Everything

Llewellyn King

It is underway. It has huge momentum, and it will change everything we do — work, leisure, health care, education, use of resources — and, as a bonus, how the world sees us. It is the Great American Reset, where things will be irreversibly changed. It is a seminal reset that will shape the decades […]

How China’s Rare Earths Monopoly Controls Our Destiny

How China’s Rare Earths Monopoly Controls Our Destiny

Llewellyn King

A world commodities rebalancing is underway, and China is in a position of dominance. Take lithium, where China is a major processor and battery manufacturer; cobalt, where China has dominated the supply chains; and rare earths, where China has an almost total monopoly. Taken together, these three commodities are key to the future of alternative […]

Long COVID Has a Baffling Sister: ME/CFS

Long COVID Has a Baffling Sister: ME/CFS

Llewellyn King

Long COVID is the condition wherein people continue to experience symptoms for longer than usual after initially contracting COVID-19. Those symptoms are similar to the ones of another long-haul disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, often called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For a decade, in broadcasts and newspaper columns, I have been detailing the agony of those who suffer […]

Copyright © 2021 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in