CFS and viruses

September 14, 2004

I stumbled across an interesting thesis on CFS at

The author suggests CFS has several causes, one of which is post-viral.

The reason post-viral has been ruled out in the US is because the

majority of cases do not correlate with viruses. Since american

researchers are uncomfortable with multiple causative factors for one

syndrome, the single " cause " of CFS is still considered unknown. But

if one considers it to be a syndrome with a range of possible causes,

that assessment is not valid. For some patients, it might be taxation,

others lurking pathogen, other combinations of factors. This would

explain why some patients get results from yin fire theory and others

from a wen bing approach. History is again the key, in order to

determine how the illness came on. If a patient did not experience a

slow decline, but rather went from a state of robust health to poor

health in a rapid decline subsequent to an acute illness, that does not

really conform to an internally generated vacuity pattern.

We should take seriously patients's reports of sudden decline and not

just dismiss them as patients who just did not notice the slow decline

until it was too late. There is a tendency to assume that Americans

are so oblivious to their own bodies that they only notice gross

illness. But I would suggest that the plethora of patients we see with

quite vague symptoms really belies this notion. I would concur with

something Craig Mitchell said at CHA, which is that many chronic

illnesses are actually due to long term obstruction. Americans may

present as vacuity patterns as a result of long term stagnation, but

stagnation is the root and no amount of supplementation will clear it.

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