As an Incline Village survivor and prototype for CFS, I felt that the film was a good representation of the disease, but very shallow on its stated mission of finding out why this disease is so neglected.
Forgotten Plague didn't cover any new ground, or ask any tough questions. Rather, simply accepting Dr. Komaroff's bland apology for a poor choice of naming the syndrome at face value... then blaming the name for all the trouble.
Dr. Komaroff's own testimony of his 1987 Low Natural Killer cell function paper proves that no one ever thought fatigue was a primary issue.
It is fairly common knowledge that, as Hillary Johnson explains in the film, that the CDC and Stephen Straus of the NIH set out to deliberately trivialize the disease out of existence... and as Hillary Johnson said, the Komaroff paper and Dr Klimas finding the same thing again in her 1992 paper, "which made her famous" was more than enough to impel medicine to move beyond any misrepresentation of CFS as little more than fatigue, or that this is a disease about which nothing is known.
Both Osler's Web by Hillary Johnson and the 1990 documentary by Kim Snyder "I Remember Me" are much more historically accurate.
If Forgotten Plague inspires people to take interest in the hidden history of CFS, it will be a good effort.
But if people accept the simple "bad name" explanation at face value without question, this documentary will actually be helping to cover up the way this disease was plagued by the CDC/NIH to be forgotten.
