How Does Chronic Fatigue Syndrome come about ?
A Brief Outline of Integrative Medical Approaches.
Executives Stress, Fatigue and Serious work Disability/ Long-term disability
A Patient Interview
A Working Diagnosic & Treatment Model
Contributing Factors to the causation of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or M.E. immune dysfunction.
Thyroid Problems
Adrenal Gland Problems
Depression & Brain Chemistry
How Does Chronic Fatigue Syndrome come about ?My experience points to a disorder of mixed causation where the initial insult may have been stress, infection, an accident, an operation an illness, a bereavement, a messy divorce ( and what divorce is not messy ?) and the list goes on. These are generally situations which most individuals can usually survive and bounce back from but people with CFIDS or ME will often say “this time there was just too much and I just didn’t bounce back.” Other times the reason for not bouncing back is the extremely busy, stressed business person on a treadmill who just “cannot” take any time off. Another scenario is the individual who suffers an illness at a time which coincides with a time of great personal stress and strain e.g. the serious illness or death of a parent or perhaps severe marital problems. In quite a lot of cases the actual trigger is very difficult to pinpoint. All the patient knows is that they went into that health nosedive.
Why do some individuals get Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and other individuals, who have been through almost identical circumstances, escape apparently unscathed ?
Each person’s individual biochemistry is different with all that implies: slightly different enzyme systems, a different genetic makeup and a different immune system. Some people just never seem to get ill no matter how hard they try to! We all recognise the individual who drinks like the proverbial fish, smokes like the proverbial chimney, works early and late, travels incessantly and is hardly ever ill. On the other hand we are also familiar with people who have one glass of dry sherry at Easter, another at Christmas (if they are feeling truly daring), whose lives are relatively stress-free but who are always adept at picking up whatever bug is going despite their excessive moderation.
Some scientists have referred to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers as ‘human canaries’
In the old days the miners took canaries down the mines with them. If toxic gases were escaping the canaries, whose biochemical systems were unable to detoxify poisonous gases as efficiently as the miners, would demonstrate the signs of toxic gas poisoning before any of the miners were affected and the birds would become unconscious. This would, hopefully, alert the miners that it was high time to get out of the mine before they suffered any ill-effects themselves. The canaries were more vulnerable to the toxic gases because their detoxification enzyme systems were not as strong as the miners’ and this afforded the miners a valuable few minutes warning about the presence of poisonous gas before they, too, would be overcome. They knew that it was time to leave the mine as quickly as possible. Some chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers will have enzyme systems that are sluggish and just cannot cope with the amount of detoxification that our drinking, smoking, hard-working, early-and-late, seriously celebratory friend’s system can happily process.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome often occurs when there is an unfavourable combination of circumstances and an individual’s system is pushed just a little too far beyond his or her physical or emotional (e.g. bullying at work) limits.
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