Main Menu
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME / CFS) Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS), Fibromyalgia Leading Research. Delivering Hope.Open Medicine Foundation® Canada
Donate
Sign Up

🩺 Transforming ME/CFS Care – How Education is Changing Lives

We envision a world where ME/CFS-informed clinicians are accessible to all. That’s why Open Medicine Foundation (OMF) and Bateman Horne Center (BHC) partnered to create the Medical Education Resource Center (MERC)—a program dedicated to training healthcare professionals worldwide in diagnosing and treating ME/CFS and related conditions. 

To date, MERC has:

✅ Reached 15,000 healthcare professionals across 89 countries

✅ Delivered 115+ expert-led lectures to leading medical institutions & health systems 

✅ Developed a Clinical Care Guide: Managing ME/CFS, Long COVID & IACCs (launching May 9th!) to make ME/CFS care more accessible to all

The image collage shows: A diverse group of healthcare professionals in a focused discussion, two female doctors smiling and talking in a hospital setting, a doctor speaking with a patient and companion in a relaxed, home-like environment.

Realizing our vision requires networking and dissemination among institutions, agencies, medical systems, and professional associations. As this process takes place, many are still without informed medical care in their local community.

That is why we also create resources that equip patients to both work with their local providers and self-support symptoms—leading to a better quality of life now. Here is a snapshot of our most popular resources among the lived-experience community.

  1. The Life with a Low Battery: Living with ME/CFS video helps family, friends, and associates gain insight into living with ME/CFS. 
  2. The ME/CFS Crash Survival Guidebook has empowered countless individuals to better understand and manage the debilitating “crashes” that come with this complex illness.
  3. The Orthostatic Intolerance (OI) Overview has helped thousands of patients and providers recognize and manage the conditions that fall under the OI umbrella.  
  4. The Basics series breaks down key aspects of ME/CFS and related conditions in concise and accessible videos. 
  5. The Staying Within Your Energy Envelope by Modifying Tasks video helps individuals avoid PEM by getting into the details of pacing strategies.
  6. The ER and Urgent Care Considerations guide equips providers with critical strategies to deliver safe and effective care. 
MERC logo

But we can’t do this without you. Your support fuels this progress. Every donation helps expand provider education, develop new patient resources, and bring better care to ME/CFS and Long COVID communities. 

Join us in changing the future of ME/CFS and Long COVID care.

Donate to MERC

Consent management

Consent Preferences

Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) Form 

Microvesicles and viral sequencing
Microvesicles are a type of extracellular vesicle that is released from the cell membrane. Vesicles are small, fluid-filled sacs or vacuoles within the body. Sequencing is a technique used to determine the exact sequence of bases (A, C, G, and T) in a DNA (or viral) molecule.
NMR Metabolomics
NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) is an instrument/tool used to perform metabolic studies, metabolic profiling, and metabolomics in biofluids and tissues for more than 40 years using magnetic fields. There is a very close connection between metabolic measurements and NMR. This connection has flourished because of NMR’s many unique strengths for characterizing complex mixtures’ chemical composition.
Proteomics
The large-scale study of proteins, which are large, complex molecules that are required for structure, function, and regulation of the human body's tissues and organs.
Autoantibodies
Antibodies that react with self-molecules and that occur in healthy individuals and are referred to as natural antibodies or autoantibodies.
Extracellular DNA for viral reactivation and Mitochondrial DNA
exDNA (extracellular DNA), exDNA is often secreted actively and is used to perform several tasks, thereby offering an attractive target or tool for biotechnological, medical, environmental, and general microbiological applications. Viruses are intracellular parasites that rely to a significant extent on the host cell for replication. Viral reactivation occurs when an active replication of the viral genome results in a lytic (degradation of the cell) infection characterized by the release of new progeny (descendant) virus particles.
Immune cell profiling
The immune system has many important regulatory roles in disease development and progression. Given the emergence of effective immune therapies, reliable predictors of response are needed. Immune cell profiling determines response by evaluating immune cell populations from treated and untreated samples. For our purposes, we will evaluate the white blood cell response to the viral infection using a process called “Cytof.”
Leukocyte Genomics
A leukocyte is a colorless cell circulating in the blood and body fluids and is involved in counteracting foreign substances and disease. A genome is all genetic material of an organism. Genomics is a biology field focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. Therefore, leukocyte genomics is the study of all genetic material of leukocytes.
Metabolomics
Metabolomics is a way to study metabolism – that is, through measuring amounts of the metabolites (small molecules) produced by our bodies as we convert food into energy and other molecules that our cells need to survive. Metabolomics technology is ‘large-scale,’ meaning that several thousand metabolites can be measured from a single sample of e.g., blood or urine.
Micro RNA
Cells use Micro RNA to control whether a particular gene is making too much, too little or the normal amount of its protein at a particular time.