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Activities of Daily Living/Functional Capacity
Daily Activities Worksheet (PDF)
Karnofsky Scale
Community & Social Impact
CFS Far More Common than AIDS, HIV Infection or Lung
Cancer
Fibromyalgia: Not All In Your Head
Fighting a Mystery Disease
Looking Good But Not Feeling Fine
Politics, Science and the Emergence of a New Disease
2004: New Study Finds High Prevalence Of Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome
Diagnostics
Balance the Th1/Th2 Immune System
Blood Draws
Dysautonomias (Autonomic Nervous System
disorders)
Hemodynamics Instability in CFS
CFS and Fibromyalgia: Caused by the same disease?
Community-Based Study of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Disease of a Thousand Names
Does chronic Lyme disease play a role in
CFIDS?
Dr.
Nancy Klimas Answers Questions on CFS
Dysregulation Spectrum Syndrome
Enterovirus related
metabolic myopathy: a postviral fatigue syndrome
Epstein-Barr & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Fatigue Syndromes and the Ætiology
of Autoimmune Disease
What
is the Fibromyalgia Syndrome and Why is it Important? (ACR)
Fibromyalgia Pain Isn't All In Patient's Heads, New
Brain Study Finds
Fibromyalgia Information
(Canada)
Fibromialgia y síndrome crónico de la fatiga en español
Fibromyalgia (FM) and Chronic Myofascial Pain (CMP)
Further Organic Abnormalities in CFIDS (Orthostatic
Intolerance)
Gene Expression
Research in CFS
Home Environment Testing Kits
Hypovolemia and CFIDS
Important
Tests for CFS, FM and RA
Immune System Overviews
The Interface of Lyme
Disease with CFS and FM: Diagnostic and Treatment Issues
Intimations
of Infection in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Fibromyalgia
Keep Your Eye On CFIDS (Ophthalmic Irregularities)
Late
and Chronic Lyme Disease: Symptom Overlap with CFS & FM
Massachusetts CFIDS
Association CFS Primer for Physicians
Neuroendocrine Abnormalities in CFS Deserve More
Comprehensive Study
On Liver, Thyroid and Toxicity
Red Blood Cell Shape Abnormality
RNAse-L
Enzyme Dysfunction
Second World Conference on CFS and Related Disorders
Some Doctors Operate on People Diagnosed with Chronic
Fatigue
Study
Identifies Three Subgroups of Fibromyalgia
Testing Laboratories for CFS, FM,
Metals Toxicity, Other Disorders
The Physical Basis of CFS
Uncertainty of Hair Analysis for Trace Metals
Neurocognitive Issues
Differentiating Between CFIDS and Primary
Depression
Late Effects of Concussions and Head Injuries
Memory: The Art of Drawing
A Blank
The MMPI-2 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Profile
Neurocognitive Impairment in CFS
Protocol for Cognitive Assessment for CFIDS
Relationships of Cognitive Difficulties to Immune
Measures, Depression and Illness Burden in CFS
Should you get a neuropsych
workup?
Cardiopulmonary Issues
Dysautonomias (Autonomic Nervous System disorders)
On Cryptostrongylus
pulmoni and multisystemic
illness
Tricky Heart May Cause CFS
Suspected New Species of Chronic Roundworm
Parasite, Cryptostrongylus pulmoni, Associated with CFS in Blinded Trials
Communicating with Physicians and Disability Reviewers
Frustrations of a Physician Treating CFS
Can we talk? How to communicate with your doctor
Trying to Look Good When You Feel Like Crap: Don't
More articles...
Is your
physician putting down your Internet research?
Google Searches Out the Diagnosis, Stat
Have You Considered...Lyme Disease and Other Tickborne Infections?
If you have been sick for
years, and along the way were diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome
and/or fibromyalgia syndrome, and have not responded significantly, or
positively at all for very, to many different treatment protocols that seem to
be very helpful to others who were diagnosed with CFS and/or FM, then what
ever made them sick isn't what has made you sick.
The word
"syndrome" just means "a consistent set of symptoms for which
no as yet identified cause exists."
"Chronic Fatigue Syndrome"
is an umbrella term for a set of symptoms shared by too many people to
logically ignore (i.e., it isn't mass hysteria, hypochondria, or
Munchausen's) assigned to a group of people who share the same constellation
of symptoms, but who may not have become ill in the same way.
Some were later found to
have widespread systemic Candida infections (fixed by diet), some
mercury toxicity (fixed by chelation and, in extreme cases, removal of
amalgam fillings). Some actually had severe hypothyroidism,
or abnormalities in other hormone levels, all of which were corrected and
remain corrected by monitoring medication levels. Some actually have
relapsing/remitting Epstein-Barr virus or Cytomeagaly virus, or both. Some
actually were infected by a mycoplasma. Some actually turned out to have
chronic iron deficiency or iron storage disease, both not detected by
standard iron tests.
For many of us, however,
while we may have had many of the things mentioned above, and many other
things besides, none of the treatment protocols that prove effective in
restoring others to normal or near-normal pre-onset levels of health and
functioning worked for us.
Over the past couple of
years, an increasing number of doctors in California, where I live, have
become not only cognizant that we some widespread Borrelia burgdorferi
(the organism that causes Lyme disease) living in ticks throughout almost
every county in our state, but that a huge number of patients originally
diagnosed with CFS and FM, who have not been found to have any other
illness/disorder that, when treated, significantly reduced their CFS & FM
symptoms, are in fact infected with B. burgdorferi and, as is common
in other Lyme-endemic areas, one or more other organisms who happily inhabit
ticks carrying B. burgdorferi.
In the small support group
to which I have been associated for over a decade, an increasing number of us
are turning up positive for Lyme disease when tested using newer tests. Some
of us requested or agreed to be treated for Lyme despite negative test results,
to find that subsequent tests showed that we had chronic infections and, in
some cases, reactivated or new infections.
In my case, I had negative
results in 1991 and 1999, in tests done by three different labs. Because of
getting a positive test result in 1999 for Babesia, another tickborne
organism, commonly found with B. burgdorferi, my doctor and I decided
to start me on a treatment protocol for Lyme disease as well as for the Babesia.
It wasn't until several months after I had completed an initial course of
high-dose doxycycline that I
finally got a positive IgG Western blot result for
Lyme. (A retest of my Babesia showed that treatment knocked the organisms titers down to "non-infective"
levels.)
Am I cured and back at
work? No. But for now, I am not quite as sick, and some important--to
me-quality of life indicators started improving several months after I
finished the first course of doxy, including not being nearly as chemically
sensitive to the chemicals associated with daily living that our society
exposes us to.
That's more than can be
said for all the other treatment protocols I have tried through the years for
CFS and FM. That goes, too, for addressing my other health problems, any of
which may have been originally induced by the effects of B. burgdorferi
in the body, especially how if affects hormone
production and cascades, autonomic nervous system, and other brain functions.
The following article isn't
new, but it does highlight why people who continue to be sick with CFS and FM
need to consider Lyme disease and other types of parasitic and infectious
organisms as being at the root of their original health decline. If, after
reading what I have written here and this article, you want to learn more,
including why tests are so often negative when the person really does have
the organism(s) living and reproducing inside of them, please head to my Lyme
page, and read the article on Seronegativity,
and more up-to-date research, testing information, and treatment protocols.
Late
and Chronic Lyme Disease:
Symptom Overlap with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Fibromyalgia
Children and CFS/FM
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It's All In Your Head (IAIYH)
We've
run all the tests, doc, and can't find anything wrong. It must be
psychological.
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