About the Chronic Market
Welcome to the Chronic Market; thanks for stopping by! I’m April Thompson, the founder of this platform for artists and artisans disabled by the condition ME/CFS to sell their work, share their stories, create awareness about the condition, and raise funds for research and advocacy.
Like the artists in the Chronic Market, I suffer from ME/CFS (otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a devastating multi-system disease that causes dysfunction of the neurological, immune, endocrine and energy metabolism systems.
ME/CFS often follows an infection and leaves 75% of those affected unable to work and 25% homebound are bedridden, some of whom are too ill to even speak or feed themselves. An estimated 15-30 million people worldwide have ME/CFS. There is no treatment, and no definitively known cause, though study after study has shown the significant abnormalities in the immune, neurological and other symptoms compared to healthy controls.
I developed ME/CFS 13 years ago when I was in peak health and physical conditioning, a multi-sport athlete who had run marathons, boxed competitively, and climbed mountains all over the world. A cold/flu virus lingered and left me so weak I couldn’t make it around the block, though just days earlier I’d been able to run miles on end. It has waxed and waned over the years, but I never fully regained my functioning.
ME is a spectrum illness, meaning that there is a broad range of severity. I am blessed to still work a full time job, as most cannot, but still the smallest bout of physical exertion is enough to potentially make me ill for days. I often rely on wheelchair assistance to go further than a block, yet my level of functioning is considered quite high compared to the majority of other patients.
The Chronic Market: Funding Research, Empowering Artists with ME/CFS
By making a purchase or donation, you are helping economically empower chronically ill individuals, helping raise awareness for a maligned and misunderstood condition, helping raise funds for critical research, and helping to get the artistic talents and stories of chronically ill artists, musicians, writers, designers and artisans shared worldwide. The website is run 100% on a volunteer basis, with a minimal percent taken from each sale to cover operating costs, with the remainder going to the creator/vendor and an additional 5% to the Open Medical Foundation, which conducts critical research from private funding on ME/CFS.
There is a huge disparity in research funding for ME/CFS. ME/CFS is more prevalent than multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS and more debilitating than MS, heart disease and stroke and yet the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other global health institutions have allocated scarcely any resources to investigate it. In 2020 the NIH will spend a mere $13 per patient on ME/CFS research compared to $253 per MS patient, for example.
Donations made on top of a purchase through the marketplace will support operating expenses for the platform, whereas donations to individuals made through gallery listings (as opposed to the marketplace) support those individual artists with direct contributions. If you wish to make a donation directly to research, please visit the Open Medical Foundation’s website. Every amount, large or small, counts!