Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

Why does a medical researcher need to be on Twitter?

This is not scientific research, it's chronic fatigue researchers getting hate mail. Also, it's not activists, it's random crackpots.

Edit: look, read the article, and then downvote me if you must. I am sure that online activists in many areas are reducing public discussion. I'm not addressing the subject in general; just this article. Specifically, the article talks about a very particular narrow, topic (chronic fatigue syndrome and research indicating that it's psychosomatic) and doesn't talk much beyond one actual activist in that area, Tuller. The title would have been better as, "CFR activist harasses CFR researchers".

Edit: could hardly get downvoted more than I have been already, but the irony that "activists" are silencing people is rich. Maybe anti-activist activists are activists, too.

Because they can and want to. Why are you on HN?

I'd like to comment here that this is primarily about chronic fatigue syndrome. There are other handwaving statements towards vaccines, global warming, and GMO, but none of those statements have a clear factual outlay. It's particularly interesting to me that it was implied that the activism against physical exercise/CBT to treat (not cure) chronic fatigue had done damage to the motivations of scientists to perform further research into the treatment of chronic fatigue.

This was distinctly not about common controversies around identities such as the existence or non existence of biological/cognitive differences of race, sexuality, and gender, even though those would be IMO the most pertinent subjects to cover about how(and if) science is affected by activism (as they have the most significant activists for all possible political opinions). I find that this exclusion particularly fascinating, or is it perhaps I am personally biased to assume they're more common and more obvious journalistic study due to my existence in tech, where the gender and racial gaps are talked about by all of the leading industry employers?

EDIT: I should clarify I do not know if science is affected by activism, but anecdotally I hear a lot about how such-and-such field of study (particularly about race, gender, and sexuality) is being limited because of activism. I've never seen actual evidence of this limiting, and the fact that this article explicitly excludes all three may be a 'absence of evidence is evidence of absence' scenario. Or again, it may be that I am personally more aware of those specific discussions due to my presence in tech where those positions are taken far more than chronic fatigue syndrome is discussed.

Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.".

I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those without a clear physical mechanism, such as RSI or chronic back pain) are psychosomatic.

A lot of people struggle with this idea, and take it, as they did in the article, as "my pain isn't real". Sarno's book very clearly lays out that the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, not the rest of your body.

Societally it's all very strange. We accept a "mind-body" connection for certain types of disorders, but, not for others. Anxiety sufferers can fool themselves into thinking they're having a heart attack and hyperventilate. Why is it crazy or anti-scientific to think that the same can cause other symptoms? We've searched for decades for body-based mechanisms for these chronic pain conditions, why not consider causes in the brain?