by Jody Smith There just aren’t enough hours in the day for the person with ME/CFS. At least, it’s been like this for me. It’s not that I’m so terribly busy. Indeed, I am not. Not like I used to be busy, before illness. The complicating factor and really, the only factor I have any control over, is the
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by Jody Smith One of the things that can strike fear into the heart of a person with ME/CFS is the prospect of going to the doctor. Worse yet is the ordeal of having to travel a long distance for such an appointment. An hour or two traveling is bad enough but sometimes it’s necessary to be on the move
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The advent of autumn can hit Jody Smith pretty hard. She’s learned a few ways to lessen the damage every year. How do you handle the change of seasons? Summer is my best season, hands down. Fewer ME/CFS symptoms get in my way. After a while, I tend to forget that this is a summer hiatus … but I am reminded around the
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Simon McGrath provides a patient-friendly version of a peer-reviewed paper which highlights some of the most promising biomedical research on ME/CFS … Recently, Professor Jonathan Edwards, with patients and carers as co-authors (including me), published a peer-reviewed editorial in the medical journal Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior. The article became their most-viewed paper within a few days. The editorial highlights
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In our second article on how to react to the publication of the draft P2P report, Gabby Klein provides her view of why she and a large group of advocates and patients are continuing their protest of the government’s ongoing control and manipulation of our disease via their processes of the P2P and IOM. In yesterday’s piece, Clark Ellis critiqued and praised elements in
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Have you had enough of all the neglect and abuse of ME/CFS patients? Gabby Klein says now is the time for a National PR Campaign for ME/CFS to impress a change. Join the Patient Revolution to restore power to ME patients … Thirty years of neglect, incompetence and malfeasance by the Department of Human services (HHS) have rendered ME patients
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Simon McGrath looks at new objective evidence of abnormal response to exercise in ME/CFS patients, and the questions that researchers are still trying to answer … Given the doubt, scepticism and even denial of benefits that often confronts ME/CFS patients, it’s not surprising that many patients crave clear-cut, objective evidence of physiological problems in the illness. Preferably something that will
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Simon McGrath looks at theories that microglia, the brain’s immune cells, might be overactive and driving the symptoms of ME/CFS and fibromyalgia. In Part 1, he described how the body reacts to infection or wounding with a “sickness response” that partly resembles ME/CFS, and how the microglia are the last step in the physiological mechanisms that lead to sickness response.
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The latest video release from the Dutch group ME/cvs Vereniging, with Dr Charles Shepherd from the UK ME Association, and announcing a live chat session to be held Thursday, April 10, 2014… ME/cvs Vereniging launched a series of broadcasts from expert clinicians and researchers in January 2013, as part of a government subsidized project called, “Science to Patients”. Each expert
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In the first in a new series of ‘In Brief’ articles, Andrew Gladman provides a helpful insight into the science behind fairly common topics and explores how they relate to ME/CFS. This time he looks at the muscles, exploring how our reported symptoms might be associated with our condition and considers why such problems could occur… When ME/CFS is discussed,
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Andrew Gladman considers the importance of dysautonomia and several of its component parts — neurally mediated hypotension, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome — all recognised as problematic comorbidities by ME/CFS patients … Dysautonomia, most commonly experienced as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), is a recognised comorbidity of ME/CFS. There is little debate surrounding this and much research
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It has been seven years since Jody Smith began seeing her Naturopath Doctor. Time then for a brief reflection on the extent to which a variety of interventions may have helped move Jody forwards in her own battle with ME/CFS… February, this year, marks seven years since I began seeing my naturopath, Dr. Kelly Upcott. For six and a half
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