In February 2010, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on ME (APPG on ME) produced a legacy paper, which welcomed the recent MRC initiative, but felt that  far too much emphasis in the past had been on psychological research, with insufficient attention to biomedical research, and that further biomedical research must be undertaken to help discover a cause and more effective forms of management for this disease.Controversy surrounds psychologically oriented models of the disease and behavioral treatments conducted in the UK. United States
In 1998, $13 million  for CFS research was found to have been redirected or improperly accounted for by the United States CDC, and officials at the agency misled Congress about the irregularities. The agency stated that they needed the funds to respond to other public-health emergencies. The director of a US national patient advocacy group charged the CDC had a bias against studying the disease. The CDC pledged to improve their practices and to restore the $13 million to CFS research over three years.On 29 October 2015, the National Institutes of Health declared its intent to increase research on ME/CFS. The NIH Clinical Center was to study individuals with ME/CFS, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke would lead the Trans-NIH ME/CFS Research Working Group as part of a multi-institute research effort.
In a letter published online in the Lancet in 2016, Dr Charles Shepherd, medical advisor to the MEA, expressed the view that the contention between patients and researchers lay in "a flawed model of causation that takes no account of the heterogeneity of both clinical presentations and disease pathways that come under the umbrella diagnosis of ME/CFS".Patient organisations have rebuffed the use of CBT as a treatment for CFS to alter illness beliefs. The ME Association (MEA) recommended in 2015, based on the results of an opinion survey of 493 patients who had received CBT treatment in the UK, CBT in its current form should not be used as a primary intervention for people with CFS. In 2019, a large UK survey of people with ME/CFS reported that CBT was ineffective for more than half of respondents. Graded exercise therapy
Recommendation for treatment using graded exercise therapy (GET) was removed from NICEs updated Guidelines for Diagnosis and Management of ME/CFS in October 2021. It was removed due to low quality evidence regarding benefit, with the guidelines now stating that clinicians should not prescribe "any programme that ... uses fixed incremental increases in physical activity or exercise, for example, graded exercise therapy." Previously, the National Institutes of Health concluded that while GET could produce benefits, it may not yield improvement in quality of life, and because of this limitation GET should not be considered as a primary treatment. It was recommended to be used only as one component of a broader approach.