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Some doctors dismissed it as psychosomatic and called it “yuppie flu.”

For a long time, ME/CFS—which is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome and bears a strong resemblance to some cases of long COVID—was popularly referred to as “yuppie flu.”

In 1985, after another apparent outbreak in Incline Village, Nev., near Lake Tahoe, the media piled on, derisively calling the condition the “yuppie flu” — or as Newsweek described it in 1990, “a fashionable form of hypochondria.”

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, C.F.S. was derisively nicknamed “yuppie flu” and “the Hollywood blahs.”

Patient advocates say the condition has a history of being dismissed as “yuppie flu” or plain indolence.