Chronic fatigue syndrome may have a post-viral infection origin

I think conditioning medical students to race other medical students to label health problems quickly- efectively turning medical school into a sleep deprived game of trivial pursuit for competitive, high IQ, mentally resilient, energetic people - only prepares those people to heal simple medical conditions involving 1 or 2 body systems. This functionality is becoming largely replaceble by llm’s who are also competent at that level of system complexity.

The leading medical solution for CFS is pacing and a web link. Chatgpt could do that.

Once you are past a certain level of system complexity - root cause analysis becomes useless as changing one part of the system affects the other parts unpredictably.

I am diagnosed with CFS. Didn’t seek the diagnosis, denied it initially which is not the norm.I now pretend I don’t have it as that is the best way to cure it.

But beating it was hell as you literally get given an A4 sheet of paper explaining the condition when diagnosed. And your brain is exhausted after reading the sheet. But that is all you have.

So you are supposed to take that A4 sheet of paper and troubleshoot your way out of the condition when the instructions on the A4 sheet don’t even work.

The best way I can describe it is you find yourself in a shame riddled labyrinth, your brain doesn’t work, you are tired and in pain and you are told to accept your new normal.

There are ways out of the labyrinth. A doctor doesn’t have the map though.

The best way to describe chronic fatigue is extreme sensitivity to over exertion. You walk to the mailbox and 24 to 72 hours later your body reacts like you’ve run the boston marathon and the mind reacts like you’ve just pulled an all nighter to manually sort 7 tabs of 3 columns and 10,000 rows of a spreadsheet on a 17 inch monitor under time pressure while hung over, 3 days into the flu in order to resurrect hitler.

CFS exhaustion and brain fog can get triggered by any stress response. And it kicks in 24 to 72 hours after stress exposure.

The Doc says pacing and mindfullness will save you. Except it won’t.

The body can get stuck in unhealthy stable states. I always encourage people to look at the roche biochemistry chart (with about the same success rate as treatment plans for CFS) to understand that the body can be hypersensitive to overexertion (mental or physical) for an infinite number of combinations.

Fortunately there are a quite a number of things that you can do to escape the labyrinth.

- Explain to anyone that cares that there is a medical field dedicated to assessing levels of debilitation and that cfs is as debilitating as cancer. (Very few people care)

- get stable accommodation.

- Get a comfortable supportive bed to convalesce in.

- Eat a diet that minimises inflammation - deeply boiled veges, rice, potatoe or sweet potatoe, grass/algal fed free range protein, olive oil. Maintain steady blood sugar.

- Body strength train.

- Sort out a vitamin and supplement regime with a genetic analysis.

- Take an anger management course to understand the anger of others.

-Understand pain - the curable app on chronic pain management is highly beneficial.

- Learn to forgive. Resentment ruins health.

- Get a career you are capable of. Aim low.

- Get regular physical activity.

- Perform improvisational comedy to condition the mind to cope with an onslaught of public social pressure.

- Pretend you don’t have chronic fatigue syndrome.

What doctors get wrong ( it is hard for them to comprehend the condition as most aren’t susceptible as they were tough enough to get through medical school) is that chronic avoidance is the right strategy until your body can cope with stress without fatiguing.

It isn’t all in your head. I’d say ability to sideplank and neck strength are probably two of the most important recovery metrics. Drs don’t understand the psycho-somatic balance of the illness. There is a psychological component but it is a minor component and is driven by physical constraints.

The sad thing is that cfs is quite treatable but the medical profession says pacing and mindfulness is all one needs to cure something that is as debilitating as cancer.

You don’t need to be mindful to beat chronic fatigue syndrome. I think sarcasm is more beneficial when coping with a bleak future.

And I really like and admire Doctors - it’s not their fault that their system is terrible at creating healing treatment plans for complex chronic health conditions.

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You might think that but it doesn’t heal anyone. Recovery rates for cfs are abysmal, I’m surprised you aren’t ashamed of your profession’s performance in this area. You seem comfortable placing responsibility for the illness on your patients “avoidance”. Yet it is initiated by a virus and everyone has different levels of mitochondrial density, resilience and health and different inflammatory cascades. “Avoidance” of what?

The medical profession has a chronic pattern of avoiding the fact they can’t heal anything involving more than about 4 variables. Explain how vitamin d, k, and serum ferritin interact in bone marrow please Doc or cholesterol’s role in cellular permeability as an immune defense or a vitamin D deficiencies effect on the permeability of cartilage and subsequent concentrations of potassium in the inner ears please doc, or latent hibernation responses, or the effect of obstetrics on the mitochondrial health of a population, or unknown pathogens or a combination of all of those things.

Because any combination of a breakdown in those things could be contributors to the fatigue you’ve attributed to avoidance yet your profession has avoided researching all of them. Your profession avoids the fact that medical research is mainly focused on fast financial returns.

I do think there is a chronic pattern of some doctors avoiding shame at their self-perceived inadequacies caused by their medical school trivial pursuit trauma conditioning that is useless for complex problem solving and then projecting that shame onto their patients in order to minimise the cognitive dissonance surrounding their ineffective treatment plans for chronic conditions . I cured my chronic fatigue - no thanks to your professions expertise - the avoidance was a necessary part of the cure while my body healed.

Some times people have bad luck. It is unavoidable.

I saw a hypothesis (which is older than I thought) about CFS being related to the vagus nerve. At the time I read it, it made sense to me. Basically, an residual infection close to the vagus nerve signals the brain that the body is fighting a serious infection.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23790471/

>So it's never wrong to try a pacing approach to see if it helps.

How many people who've had chronic fatigue or post-exertion malaise for a few years do you think haven't tried pacing?

I'm sure some have not tried it, but my guess is that it occurs to most as a pretty obvious thing to try even without a health-care provider's or information source's suggesting it.

Even if a person's first response to chronic fatigue is to try to power through it and work even harder, after a few months of that strategy's not working, most people it seems to me will try taking it as easy as practical for a while.