As someone who has suffered from CFS I am so happy to see it becoming more recognized and understood. You see, the frustrating part of having an illness like this is it is not well known enough for people to really understand it, but it has major impacts on your life. I can't tell you how utterly angring it is to be sitting in front of my computer and I know that if I just finish this school paper that isn't anything…
As someone whose symptoms fits the bill, how did you get diagnosed and how did you get it under control?
There seems to be a desire evident in the commentary on this topic to categorise CFS as either completely psychological, or completely physiological. My own experience, having had the condition for much of the past 10 years, and having (after many years of frustration) found treatment methods that have enabled me to achieve almost full recovery, is that it is very much both physiological and psychological, and that o…
My experience, having fully recovered, is similar, and it fits with what we know about how the brain works.
CFS is most likely "Candidasis". An overgrowth of candida bacteria/yeast in the gut. This is very well known, and easily and cost effectively treatable. Consistent overconsumption of processed sugars leads to candida overgrowth. The body addresses this naturally through inflamation. Prolonged inflamation yields depression symptoms, and a host of other things. Google: candida You can recover from this mostly in one ni…
This study suggests that candida is probably not the culprit:
"Yes, ideally we would run every possible test on any patient that walks in with a stomachache. But there are limits to our economy and to doctors' time. It's a complex problem." The problem isn't necessarily economical, a lot of those tests are actually very cheap. The problem is that most tests have high false-positive rates, which you account for by using bayesian inference: the probability of having the disease w…
I see. I was wrong to make assumptions about what the limitations are. Thanks for the link. I wonder how closely doctors follow bayesian inference (and how many know about it). It seems pretty intuitive, so maybe it's already largely applied?
In one of my courses in medical school, our professor, a physician, told us that many doctors follow Bayesian inference without even realizing, based on their experience and education. The best doctors recognize this ang educate themselves on epidemiological studies to better use tests and procedures and medications to take care of patients most effectively.
I looked at the paper and the data is kind of strange. Looking at figure 2, there are a bunch of cytokines that have a nice linear progression with increasing levels corresponding to increasing severity of disease. This seems like solid evidence that more cytokine = bad. But if you compare with the controls, mild cases of ME/CFS have less than the control, moderate cases have the same as controls, and severe cases ha…
The thing that currently spazs me out is the Simpson Paradox (Yule–Simpson effect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox In short, if your population has two (or more) diseases with similar enough symptoms that they are grouped together, statistical analysis can and does totally fail. And your experiment will produce garbage. So what if Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is really caused by a couple of different th…
It isn't really that much of a problem. If you collect data on a large enough cohort of symptomatic individuals, you can recover separate subtypes through cluster analysis.
The ailments you describe though can certainly be debilitating but require no underlying diagnosis. Me and my mother have horrible migraines, no one knows why but it doesn't matter because I was prescribed a medicine, didn't work. I was prescribed a second one and it worked and it is frustrating and it sucks but quality of life is the same. For all those ailments, we can treat stomach aches, dizziness, headaches. But…
> Also, if problems aren't certain as they are chronic, widespread or hard to diagnose you see certain specialists who are trained to diagnose. You don't see a general physician This is actually (imo) one of the largest failings in the UK's various health systems -- Diagnosticians as you have them in the US, do not exist. The entire system relies on GPs keeping up to date on various diseases and symptoms. This means…
We have diagnosticians? This is my first time hearing of them so they must be pretty rare.
Nutrition. Exercise. Stress management. I think these are mainstream health practices. There are practitioners with other qualifications. Although I've met physios with some peculiar ideas that subsequently turned out to be have a very high proportion of adverse effects (e.g. spinal adjustments). My message is consistent, I hope: try what you will, but never pretend to expertise, and steer clear of recommending or su…
Nutrition. Exercise. Stress management. I think these are mainstream health practices. If you have a very serious medical condition, like cancer, and you talk to a doctor about things like taking vitamins, most of them will pooh-pooh it as if any impact it has is merely a placebo effect. Using nutrition, exercise and stress management as part of your defense in the face of something that doctors don't really know how…
A relative was diagnosed with dementia and the doctor recommended all 3 of these things. I agree they are mainstream. Of course he's not going to say they'll cure it or cancer because there isn't evidence of that.
If you're feeling fatigued, try Calcium and Magnesium supplements. They're cheap and safe and you might simply have a lack of minerals that doesn't show up in blood tests. That's what it was for me anyway. From chronic fatigue to normal life - it feels like I took 15 years off. Calcium relieves muscle pains, Magnesium improves sleep and reduces stress. They can also have a laxative effect.
I see. I was wrong to make assumptions about what the limitations are. Thanks for the link. I wonder how closely doctors follow bayesian inference (and how many know about it). It seems pretty intuitive, so maybe it's already largely applied?
I've actually been going through this recently with a series of cancer tests with a high false positive rate. When I was discussing it with my specialist he said that he and other doctors don't necessarily think of it in rigorously Bayesian terms, but they're familiar with the sensitivity and specificity of each test and have a pretty strong understanding of what that means based on priors. Talking to medical student…
I don't think it's that they get good results, but moreso that it's the conventional wisdom (or "standard of care") and a good mechanism for learning from and properly attributing bad patient outcomes just isn't there. I doubt anybody has told them that their patient died or was given inappropriate treatments because they didn't have the proper appreciation for Bayes theorem, even if it were the root cause. That's just not the culture of medicine today.
The thing that currently spazs me out is the Simpson Paradox (Yule–Simpson effect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox In short, if your population has two (or more) diseases with similar enough symptoms that they are grouped together, statistical analysis can and does totally fail. And your experiment will produce garbage. So what if Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is really caused by a couple of different th…
Makes me think of Anscombe's Quartet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
I quit working at shoprite and now I make $35h - $80h...how? I'm working online! My work didn't exactly make me happy so I decided to take a chance on something new…after 4 years it was so hard to quit my day job but now I couldn't be happier.