I've been afflicted with what seems to be CFS for at least 10 years.
I've been through the exasperating process of seeking diagnosis and treatment from conventional doctors.
In the absence of any answers, I had to take matters into my own hands and attempt to get well with non-conventional remedies like paleo dieting, detoxing, nutritional supplements, yoga, etc.
Nothing really moved the needle in any sustained way until I started experimenting with emotional healing therapies that work to identify and release deeply-held subconscious traumas and self-sabotaging beliefs.
I've been doing that for 5-6 years now, and my wellbeing keeps improving at an ever-increasing rate.
So, my n=1 anecdata suggests that yes it's a physiological ailment (i.e., involves mitochondria, ATP, cortisol, inflammation, oxidation, T-cells, and many other material processes within the body), but that stress and trauma is a major factor, and that by addressing the stress/trauma component, the physiological component corrects itself, slowly but surely.
There is plenty of evidence to give credence to this explanation, if you simply search for studies linking excessive cortisol (a stress/fear/anxiety hormone) to immune function, auto-immunity and inflammation.
What seems to be lacking in the mainstream medical zeitgeist is an acceptance that stress/trauma can be held deeply in the subconscious, and that there are effective techniques to identify and resolve it.
But I can attest, yes, anecdotally, that it is a real phenomenon, and that effective treatments exist. If this were to be included in the research, I'm confident that CFS can be understood and an effective remedy can be made available to all sufferers.
Any researchers who are interested to know more about my experiences are welcome to contact me (email in profile). I have some lab pathology reports on things like cortisol levels, iron/zinc/copper (and other minerals), thyroid hormones, inflammatory and auto-immunity indicators, chronic infection antibodies (EBV, CMV). I'd be very willing/happy to get other tests, as I'm not yet fully healed, so there's still time to do before/after comparisons of relevant indicators.
I suffered from fatigue for some months and what helped me is to think about it as your brain being a CPU with a message queue. When the CPU is operating below 100% the queue is empty all the time. But when it comes above 100% the queue starts to get longer and longer. And it is very very difficult to reduce the amount of messages sent to the queue.
Messages can be anything the brain should handle: hormones, sight, hearing, thoughts, anything.
When the queue grows your body also starts to work stange. And this can cause serious issues[1]. And also causes more and more stress wich let the queue grow even more.
So I also believe that stress and trauma are causes and when treated reduce the message queue.
[1] for me this was a lot of muscle contraction causing insulin issues and because of that more stress.
I've meditated quite a bit. Been through some stressful events in the past few years (charged with drug trafficking,
lost access to my child). I find three things have help, in order of descending importance /: meditation, jogging, weight training.
But without meditation life is noticeable worse.
So while we're using the computer metaphor, maybe meditation is like Garbage Collection:
* Enables you to develop your application without having to free memory.
* Allocates objects on the managed heap efficiently.
* Reclaims objects that are no longer being used, clears their memory, and keeps the memory available for future allocations. Managed objects automatically get clean content to start with, so their constructors do not have to initialize every data field.
* Provides memory safety by making sure that an object cannot use the content of another object.
Quick question related to "emotional healing therapies":
how do you search for therapists that can actually help here. For me it is kind of hard to differ between esoteric charlatans and actual experts. Is there any special approach to searching them you would recommend?
This is a tricky question because there is questionable stuff out there, but on the other hand a lot of scientifically supported therapies are probably working for reasons other than their purported reasons (due to publication bias, etc.). To complicate things more, there are some therapies that seem like quackery that seem to work for reasons no one really understands. So people purporting to be adhering to "empirically supported therapy" (a kind of political buzzword) might actually be doing no better than someone else who doesn't explicitly advertise that, but who is rigorously and critically evaluating the scientific literature.
My advice is to pay attention to where someone got their degree, and how they describe themselves. By degree I don't mean you need to fetishize invalid status stuff, but look for people from degree programs you trust. If you don't feel comfortable with someone, look elsewhere. Don't feel uncomfortable asking them about their theoretical orientation or thinking about cases.
Unfortunately there's no science validating any treatment for this disease. This is what it means when they say there is no treatment or no cure. So in other words... there is no "empirically supported therapy" that can cure the condition.
The only option for treatment is to attempt treatments not yet validated by science. Whether it's by a quack doctor or a degreed doctor doesn't matter at this point.
A personal anecdote-- I suffered from cluster headaches for about 20 years, starting in high school.
Because of bad emotions and not having much success with traditional psychotherapy and anti-depressants, I started going to primal therapy.
I'm well aware that primal therapy is not considered valid in mainstream psychology. I'm not trying to debate that.
I found my therapy helpful for dealing with my daily emotional swings and negative thoughts and feelings.
Surprisingly, I found that it greatly reduced the number of cluster headaches that I had.
Long story short, I had been suppressing my actual emotions in order to appear okay and not an over-reactive emotional wreck. This was a much deeper and subtle process than "I'm okay"-- it was a subconscious, physio-psychological process involving arresting the subtle motions of my face and neck that normally create expression. This process, which I did often throughout the day, subconsciously, when I thought of something personally painful, would eventually lead up to a cluster headache.
That whole paragraph above is something I figured out on my own, while I was doing the therapy, not something that the therapist presented me with or helped me figure out. But I would not have been able to do it if I had not had a space to enact my emotions, which is what primal therapy is (it's not screaming--or, I should say, not just screaming).
Being in a place where you can actually emote what you are feeling, not just talk about what you feel, is a game-changer when you grew up not being accepted for validated as a child. I can talk about how I feel all I want-- that's what I had to learn to do as a child, going to psychologists. That has no therapeutic or helpful effect for me-- it became just another coping or defense mechanism. I'm completely dissociated from myself when I talk about my feelings. I was never allowed to actually feel.
I still have general physical pain, and get crushing migraines from time to time ( I just started a new medication for that), but thankfully I only have cluster headaches about once every six months. I attribute this entirely to the changes that came about from going to primal therapy.
I know that primal therapy has not been rigorously studied, and is generally considered "debunked" by mainstream psychology. But anyways, it really helped me. I entirely certain that the lessening of cluster headaches to almost gone was not a coincidence, and a result of primal therapy.
I know several people who are highly-scientifically minded (i.e., masters or PhD qualified in mainstream science disciplines), who've had afflictions like yours, and have resorted to similarly unproven or "debunked" treatments, and have found them effective when nothing else was.
Slightly off topic, but this just came to mind. If there's a placebo effect for positive results, it stands to reason there's also one that disables known/established remedies.
Point being, not all things will work for people all the time, but there is an element of "unknown" in everyone.
The brain is a complex and powerful organ. I'm not saying in all of these cases that's what it is but the brain has the power of placebo effect. If physical ailments get better because you merely believe you're being treated, there's a chance that there's a treatment out there that the brain responds to for some people for some illness that isn't apparent generally.
If it helps where nothing else does, is that wrong? I bet it doesn't feel wrong to you - you're just glad you're better - and I don't think so either.
When raising this subject, you need to be clear in what you mean by "placebo".
If you mean that physiological healing happened due to changes in emotions or beliefs, I agree: that's fundamentally how the technique works. It's no different to a sugar pill showing increased recovery rates in a pharmaceutical trial, which can be explained by a sense of optimism and reduced worry/stress due to a treatment being administered.
If you define placebo the way some determined skeptics do in these discussions, to be a false sense of wellbeing with no actual physiological healing [1], then (in my case, for argument's sake) you'd need to account for the measurable physiological improvements that have happened in my body, that didn't happen when I was undertaking other practices over 7+ years, but that I believed/hoped just as strongly would be effective.
I wasn't saying your treatment was placebo at all, in fact. I couldn't possibly make that call.
I'm saying that the brain is powerful enough to heal itself and the body through the placebo effect. If it's that complex, then some treatments not generally accepted will work on some people some of the time above and beyond placebo.
Sorry, I'm trying not to be defensive or argumentative, just to make this important point understood: when we are talking about physiological healing brought about by changes in emotions or beliefs, we are most likely talking about the exact same mechanism as what is commonly dismissed as the placebo effect.
The point is that it shouldn't be dismissed; it should be embraced.
I don't think emotional and psychological healing can be dismissed as placebo in physiological healing.
People think there's a great divide between mind and body but if you look at common psychological problems, they very much have a physiological representation.
With anxiety, you're heart rate and blood pressure are effected. You get tension headaches. It can trigger IBS. Hormonal changes in cortisol and adrenaline are present.
Depression drains energy and lowers stress tolerance. Stress has a similar effect as anxiety. It also has very real hormonal changes too. These can have a big impact on physiological state.
Ever been angry and then got a horrible headache? That's psychological state having a very real physiological effect!
I believe wholeheartedly that mind and body are intrinsically linked, and that you can completely heal the body (of a condition like CFS) by healing the mind. It's what I've spent the past 6 years doing.
You're just stuck on the definition of 'placebo' :)
What's the definition of placebo? Was always sure it's used as a control when testing medical treatments in which the patient doesn't know if they are receiving the treatment or not, leading to a genuine change in state from the belief they're in the experimental group, from which clinical significance is measured from as a baseline.
I'm saying that psychological healing can have physiological effects above and beyond placebo due to the very real influence psychological state has on hormones.
If you believe that it's a placebo effect, I'm not sure if it can be called a placebo effect? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know it's a placebo otherwise it'd have stopped working long ago.
Perhaps the common thread is the belief in its efficacy.
If it were strictly a placebo effect, I would expect any sort of treatment-- anti depresents (I've been on a dozen), talking theraposts, anccupuncture, accupressure, hypnotism, etc. etc. To have worked. If it were just the fact that I was being treated that caused my mind to cure itself, why did all of the previous lengthy and cost-incuring treatments fail?
If "placebo effect" is proffered as a debunking explanation, I'm curious as to the explanation of why this particular sham treatment had the placebo effect, while other sham and real treatments failed to have any effect, real or placebo.
Actually, I'm not saying it's a placebo effect at all. I'm saying that the brain is powerful enough to produce one as an example.
My point is that if the brain has that kind of healing power, it makes sense that other treatments that are not generally accepted will have healing power above and beyond placebo.
IMO it is time for people to start assuming responsibility for their own healing and the numerous psychological / brain-state-altering techniques like meditation are a perfect example.
If anything, the "placebo" sugar pills don't work by themselves; the patients feel better due to feeling calmer that their ailment is being addressed. That by itself proves that the brain has the power to cure a lot of conditions.
I personally have found ways to self-cure with deep relaxation. I have well-repressed and usually well-controlled anxiety to this day. I am usually hyper-active and if I feel a bunch of free joules of energy in my body, I usually quickly expend them; pretty bad habit but I am working on it still. Meditation helps, A LOT. It calms your mind, reduces your CPU frequency -- so to speak -- and by this mechanism, or any other (not sure which one triggers the result) your brain manages to separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on what's really important right now.
A bit off-tangent for sure. My point was that self-healing through altering the brain's state -- be it with meditation, psilocybin, or browsing your comic book collection from when you were a kid -- absolutely works. It serves as seeing the big picture periodically, roughly speaking.
Innerchild Regression Therapy is one that helped me uncover some deep emotional trauma. The difficulty is as you mentioned, people offering these therapies have different experience levels, skills, and styles.
It is really hard, no doubt. Word of mouth is best, but that relies on you already knowing someone unfortunate enough to have had to go through the process themselves.
A reliable disqualifier is anyone who purports to be any kind of heal-everything wizard. All the practitioners who've helped me the most have been well-grounded people, who don't make extravagant claims, and simply work with you to find out what's going on beneath the surface and help you find a better path.
You're welcome to email me and I can help you find someone local if need be.
My experience is similar to yours...CFS following viral infection which never cleared up, but pre-existing stressors were probably more important. Dealing with the stress, allowing my body/brain to heal, then slowly building my life back up again resulted in complete resolution.
If you look at how the brain works, there is quite a lot of evidence pointing towards chronic stress resulting in CFS-like symptoms. I suspect the culprit is the "central governor" region of the brain (which is involved in central fatigue).
I've recently been discovering I'm chronically super dehydrated, and it turns out you feel like shit all the time when you're dehydrated!
At minimum I now hear you're supposed to drink 64oz/day, or better, your body weight / 2 in oz.
Anyway, this was something very basic that escaped me for years, it's the sort of thing that is so simple nobody pays attention to it, but it has a very big impact on your whole system.
I'm not saying it's your root problem, but if you are dehydrated along with the CFS, fixing that should still improve your day-to-day noticeably.
I definitely improved my blood composition -- proven with periodical tests -- by drinking the proper dosage every day. (I'll spare you the details but certain indices were starting to go outside the safety zones.)
What a local doctor off-handedly told me once was "drink 1 liter per 25kg of body weight a day, make sure to drink the first liter in your first 1-2 waking hours, and stop actively drinking water 3 hours before going to slep -- but from then on just get a few sips if you are thirsty". The last is helping you not wake up to pee 3 times a night and trust me, that advice is well-grounded in reality!
As you say, it's a very basic thing that escapes many of us our entire lives but it definitely helped me fix a problem with a slightly thick blood and arythmia (the latter is not yet fully gone but the remainder is attributed to other factors). It also got me rid of a tense head -- I've felt like my had was between two heavy plates for years, and this is gone for 3-4 years now.
Interesting (although anecdotal of course), thanks for sharing.
From a scientific perspective this should not be a controversial hypothesis. Consider the use of placebos, their use in studies and effect perception can have on the body is well established...
However they are not explained. Getting to the bottom of CFS (if it is in-fact a severe psychological-physiological condition) could reveal some interesting physiological basis for the broader effect.
However they are not explained. Getting to the bottom of CFS (if it is in-fact a severe psychological-physiological condition) could reveal some interesting physiological basis for the broader effect.
Indeed. Had a friend with CFS and they finally tracked it down to undiagnosed Lyme disease that she's probably had for years. And that's no more likely than any number of other causes for any specific person with CFS.
Some improvement over 5-6 years seems to be weak to make an argument about one therapy to help imho, since your body heals by itself over time, like in my case.
Some improvement over 5-6 years seems to be weak to make an argument about one therapy to help imho, since your body heals by itself over time, like in my case.
Sure. You might appreciate that I've become accustomed to hearing that. It's OK, I'm happy to elaborate.
In my case, I can observe a steady/accelerating progression of ill-health from as young as 5-10, with some dramatic intensifications of symptoms that coincided with traumatic experiences during adolescence, and continuing worsening of symptoms over 25-30 years, right up until about 4 years ago (I'm now 40) - even after about 6-7 years of trying various mainstream (antidepressants is pretty much all they could offer) and natural treatments (paleo diet, regular cardio exercise and weights training, supplements, detox, yoga, meditation).
For me the pattern is clear: 25-30 of years of worsening of symptoms to a point of being extremely debilitated, the last 6-7 of those years making concerted (indeed, desperate) efforts to get well. Only after I discovered and started implementing subconscious healing practices did the decline start to slow, then turn around. It's now about 3 years since I bottomed out, and my energy is better than it's been since adolescence, and better than most people I know of a similar age.
What are your main symptoms if I may ask?
The symptoms I've had are many of those from the Phoenix Rising CFS/ME Symptoms page [1]:
I should add, and indeed emphasise: it's not "one therapy"; it's various different therapies, practices, exercises, etc, all with the objective of relieving trauma and de-activating chronically active stress/fear/anxiety mechanisms in the body.
I don't get post-exertional malaise now at all. I regularly do high-intensity spin cycling ("Soul-cycle" style, which activates the adrenals very significantly) and don't get malaise. I've also done plenty of weights training and jogging (up to 10km/6mi), over the past year, and again, post-exertional malaise is just never an issue.
Up until about 3 years ago, a solid weight training session (squat/bench/deadlift) would have me overstimulated and unable to sleep that night, then crashing for 7-10 days.
When you said "crashing for 7-10 day", what does that mean. Did you have a lot of pain and fatigue unable to get out of bed for a whole week and were you completely recovered after that week again?
What remarkable timing, this post is. Struggling with the same exact things and have tried similar remedies in the past with little effect. I'm now reading (literally was reading this last night)"the body keeps the score" by Bessel van Der kolk MD, and its quite a significant body of scientific evidence about how pychological trauma and post traumatic stress disorder is the cause of all kinds of maladies that are physiological in nature. Will be pming shortly!
Right or wrong, this appears to be a scientifically framed way of arguing "the problem's in your mind"... dealing with subconscious emotional issues, etc..
Reading between the lines it sounds like you're saying it's acedia, perhaps an extreme form. Acedia appears to be normally distributed in the population, so perhaps those who label it CFS are a couple deviations from the mean. Sure I've felt acedia too after years of working hard at a company I didn't care about with a stressful, long commute. Quitting, traveling for 3 months, exercise, indulging my neglected dating life, and ultimately a career change into a field I cared more about have kept me feeling active and motivated. If I hadn't made those dramatic changes though I very well might have messed myself up long term and developed a more extreme form of acedia.
Can you tell us more about what was holding you back
I can trace the domino trail back to as young as 3-5, and being very nervous, fearful and anxious. Some early negative social experiences may have been the genesis, and some of it may be inherited (those fearful/anxious tendencies are evident in both my parents and my sister to some degree).
From there it's just a pattern of negative experiences compounding, though with the frustration of showing a lot of promise and potential (being somewhat naturally gifted in academic and sporting pursuits, and having some success socially and romantically as I reached adolescence), but always finding I'd sabotage myself, and every time that happened I'd come away feeling worse about myself.
As I matured into adulthood the pattern continued: showing promise and having good opportunities in my career, social life and relationships, but always finding a way to mess things up, and becoming more angry, resentful and paralysed as time went by. By about 28 I was just falling apart and finding myself largely unable to function, and was increasingly exhausted and bedridden.
Since I started working with subconscious healing techniques 5-6 years ago, I've been able to learn about how I've held onto all of those negative experiences and how they've been increasingly paralysing. This makes sense as an evolutionary self-defense mechanism; the more you find that your efforts to progress in the world cause you to have traumatic experiences that you can't understand, the more your mind/body applies a "braking" mechanism, to protect you from further trauma until you can understand what's going on and learn more healthy and beneficial behaviours.
So really that's what the past 5-6 years has been about: using subconscious healing practices to understand how/why I was self-sabotaging, using that understanding to identify more positive/productive behaviours, put those into practice, observe results, rinse/repeat. The first 2-3 years was mostly just slowing the decline and bottoming out, and the subsequent 2-3 years has been a steady and accelerating path of improvement, in which career, friendships and relationships (and energy/enthusiasm) are all in good shape and getting better all the time.
I'm reluctant to share too much about exactly what techniques I've used, as it can too easily turn into a pointless arguments with determined skeptics (of which I used to be one), and I just don't need to play that game anymore.
In the mainstream medicine realm, CBT seems to be the one that does the most to work on the subconscious mind, though the little of it I've tried didn't appeal to me.
Outside of that, things like meditation (if it works for you - it didn't for me), hypnotherapy (Milton Erickson-style), breathwork/breathing therapy, EFT/tapping are all popular.
The specific techniques that have been most effective for me, I won't mention here as they really need many hours of discussion or reading to be fully understood and accepted, but you can find plenty of online material, including videos and books, by searching for things like "subconscious healing chronic fatigue".
Thank you for posting. It takes considerable courage to say even as much as you've said, in this forum.
It sounds like you don't have the same form of CFS that I do. I have the sudden-onset type: one week I categorically didn't have it, then I had what seemed like an ordinary flu-like viral illness, not noticeably different from others I had had, but then a couple of weeks later, when I tried to resume my previous level of physical activity (running and biking), I was hit with the brain fog and post-exertional malaise -- even a brisk walk was enough to bring it on.
I was under considerable emotional stress at the time, embroiled in a serious dispute with a family member, and between jobs. I'm sure that all that stress had something to do with my contracting the CFS. That's not to say I think it was just stress; rather, the stress weakened me in some way that allowed this thing, whatever it is (EBV?), to get a foothold. As you say, the body is not separate from the mind.
My doctor was sympathetic, and put me on an antiviral drug, valacyclovir, for a few years. It helped some, I believe, but wasn't a complete cure. I have also pursued some alternative approaches, primarily breathwork, which I still do occasionally. My symptoms have always been a lot milder than those some experience -- I've never been bedridden -- and they're now even milder. It's to the point that as long as I'm careful not to go too fast on the bicycle I can function as if I didn't have the disease at all, but if I overexert myself I am rudely reminded that it isn't completely gone.
Anyway, thanks again for your story. I still find it heartening and inspiring even though it sounds like your illness had a different cause than mine. I wish you continued healing.
You can search through my comment history (particularly around 20 months ago, but other points in time too) for more specifics, and also to see why I'm reluctant to repeat them now.
And you can email me for more up-to-date info and to be involved in any ongoing discussions that may develop.
Is there anyway I could contact you to learn a little more about what kind of subconscious healing practices you have used? I am in dire need of them. My life is... well... crumbling around me. :)
You're very welcome to contact me - several other people have been in touch since this post, and there may be an opportunity for an ongoing discussion.
Have you done blood testing for food sensitivities, where they test 120+ things? And nothing in particular lead me to ask this next question, however do you remember having any ear infections as a child?
Have you done blood testing for food sensitivities, where they test 120+ things?
Not that one - it never seemed top priority (given that I had a very limited budget due to being ill and unable to derive a good income, until recently). I just learned what foods/chemicals should be avoided. For me it's really just dust/dustmite, mould, some household chemicals, but that's about it. At certain points through the healing journey I've felt better when I've avoided things like grains, gluten, dairy, sugar, caffeine, but all those things are becoming less of an issue these days.
do you remember having any ear infections as a child?
Not really (I did have asthma from about 9) but I've had tinnitus (ringing ears) since about 13, which is sometimes said to be linked to inflammation/oxidation/chronic infections. That's one thing that hasn't resolved yet but I'm hopeful that it will eventually, and if/when it does, it will be interesting to observe any correlations with blood indicators of inflammation/oxidation.
I had been doing an elimination diet for a long time to figure out a lot of sensitivities. Potato may have been the most difficult for me to figure out as potato itself wouldn't bother me, but it would inflame my whole GI tract and was accumulative - so when I ate other food, no matter the food, it would irritate me.
It was an audiologist who first told me to stop eating wheat, which helped with a lot of things - prior that I didn't even realize I was allergic to egg whites because the wheat numbed me so much (there's an opiate in it that greatly affects some people).
The food sensitivity blood work I only did less than 2 years ago was quite revealing as well. Some foods that showed up I knew were an issue, other ones I didn't realize. When I cut them all out I felt much better. Now when I eat a small amount of any of those foods I can notice how it makes me feel bad quite easily; I was conditioned to feeling a certain way (now that I would describe as shitty) and reducing that agitation load long enough has let me feel the difference between a healthy baseline and a more agitated one. I would highly recommend you go to a naturopath who can send the test in for you. They just prick your finger and fill 5 little circles on a business card-sized card with your blood.
Re: Tinnitus - Auditory Integration Training (http://www.aitinstitute.org) can help with that as well as many other things. How AIT helps is with a similar system not well-understood or acknowledged like with what you posted about the complex relationship between deep hidden emotions (emotional wounds) and other symptoms or labels such as CFS.
I wrote a reply where I suggested people look into Auditory Integration Training for either themselves or their children who they said had certain autistic characteristics. Here's the thread for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657725 - and in particular someone asked to hear about my own experience with it, to which I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973
Magnesium might help improve the tinnitus. It probably won't entirely stop it, but anecdotal reports suggest it may help. If you are magnesium deficient, you are probably also calcium deficient. You may also need vitamins D and K to help properly absorb the calcium.
Any pattern of frequent infections (most commonly in the ears, sinuses, throat, chest or digestive system) indicates an impaired immune system. Early signs of this in childhood can be extrapolated to explain more serious conditions an adulthood.
For me it wasn't the ears, but it was the chest, sinuses and digestive system, from at least as young as 9.
This makes me feel like food sensitivities bloodwork may be a really good thing for you to explore and see the results of, and perhaps learning about how foods can impact you, e.g. soy, bananas, and dairy are the 3 highest mucous producing foods you can eat - will cause your chest, sinuses, ears, etc. to generate a lot of mucous which causes its own problems.
I really need to do a full writeup on my understanding of my experiences, especially relating to this question I ask people.
As an interesting side note, wheat is connected to childhood ear infections.
I wrote a reply where I suggested people look into Auditory Integration Training for either themselves or their children who they said had certain autistic characteristics. Here's the thread for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657725 - and in particular someone asked to hear about my own experience with it, to which I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973
Thanks for sharing your experience. Are there any books which you would recommend? I have my e-mail on my profile, if you find time, I would be really interested in any books/techniques which helped you.
> Nothing really moved the needle in any sustained way until I started experimenting with emotional healing therapies that work to identify and release deeply-held subconscious traumas and self-sabotaging beliefs.
Have you been following any of the research on gut bacteria? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts/feelings as to how that might also tie into things, or not.
I've been afflicted with what seems to be CFS for at least 10 years.
I've been through the exasperating process of seeking diagnosis and treatment from conventional doctors.
In the absence of any answers, I had to take matters into my own hands and attempt to get well with non-conventional remedies like paleo dieting, detoxing, nutritional supplements, yoga, etc.
Nothing really moved the needle in any sustained way until I started experimenting with emotional healing therapies that work to identify and release deeply-held subconscious traumas and self-sabotaging beliefs.
I've been doing that for 5-6 years now, and my wellbeing keeps improving at an ever-increasing rate.
So, my n=1 anecdata suggests that yes it's a physiological ailment (i.e., involves mitochondria, ATP, cortisol, inflammation, oxidation, T-cells, and many other material processes within the body), but that stress and trauma is a major factor, and that by addressing the stress/trauma component, the physiological component corrects itself, slowly but surely.
There is plenty of evidence to give credence to this explanation, if you simply search for studies linking excessive cortisol (a stress/fear/anxiety hormone) to immune function, auto-immunity and inflammation.
What seems to be lacking in the mainstream medical zeitgeist is an acceptance that stress/trauma can be held deeply in the subconscious, and that there are effective techniques to identify and resolve it.
But I can attest, yes, anecdotally, that it is a real phenomenon, and that effective treatments exist. If this were to be included in the research, I'm confident that CFS can be understood and an effective remedy can be made available to all sufferers.
Any researchers who are interested to know more about my experiences are welcome to contact me (email in profile). I have some lab pathology reports on things like cortisol levels, iron/zinc/copper (and other minerals), thyroid hormones, inflammatory and auto-immunity indicators, chronic infection antibodies (EBV, CMV). I'd be very willing/happy to get other tests, as I'm not yet fully healed, so there's still time to do before/after comparisons of relevant indicators.