By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. A riff on Dr. Peter Rowe’s presentation at the 2020 Dysautonomia International Conference (note that I expand on many of Rowe’s points; i.e. not all the words are his.) Lauren Stiles, the founder of Dysautonomia International, has long believed that the chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and dysautonomia fields […]
Cort Johnson
Ivabradine – Could A “Wonder Drug” For POTS Work In ME/CFS ?
Study Suggests Energy Production Problems May Be Everywhere In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. As time has gone on, the energy production issue in chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has become better and better documented as researchers take different slants on it. Take the whole body energy production tests. Workwell’s two day cardiopulmonary exercise tests (CPETs) have documented the damaging effects that exercise one day […]
Whoops ! Did A GET Study Just Explain Why It DOESN’T Work In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) ?
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Question: When does a graded exercise study explain why graded exercise is not helpful for chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)? Answer: when it employs an exercise test with it. Just as NICE was pulling back on graded exercise therapy (GET) a GET study was published showing why it doesn’t work. The authors […]
The Present (And Future) CoQ10 for Fibromyalgia And Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
A Never-Ending Immune Battle In ME/CFS ? The Regulatory T-cell / Herpesvirus Hypothesis
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. The failed Rituximab trial might seem like the death knell for autoimmunity in chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) but it’s not – not by a long shot. While the B-cells that Rituximab targeted are at the heart of much autoimmunity, T-cells can also cause autoimmune diseases. They also play a […]
Celebrating Whitney Dafoe And His “Awakening” On His 37th Birthday
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. It’s Whitney Dafoe’s 37th birthday. He’s had chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) since 2004 and has been severely ill since about 2012. Fed by feeding tubes, eyes and ears covered, too weak to move, unable to speak or tolerate almost any stimuli. Whitney has hovered in a kind of […]
Long-Term Saline Use Improves Cardiovascular Functioning In ME/CFS: A Workwell Case Report
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. The exercise physiologists at the Workwell Foundation are pretty darn good at providing thought provoking case reports. A couple of years ago, a Workwell case report indicated that a very ill ME/CFS patient was able, using Workwell’s heart rate-based exercise program, to not just halt the steady decline […]
The Brain Fog In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) Plus Even Mini Tilt Table Tests Wrack The Severely Ill
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. The two Dutch researchers, C. Linda van Campen and Frans Visser, and Peter Rowe from the U.S., have been on a tear recently. The Van Campen/Visser team (mostly with Peter Rowe) have published 6 ME/CFS studies thus far in 2020, one in 2019 and three in 2018. This […]
An Open Letter To The COVID-19 Long Hauler Community From A Person With ME/CFS
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. “If you look anecdotally, there is no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a post-viral syndrome that in many respects incapacitates them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery. They report symptoms such as brain fog, difficulty concentrating and fatigue that resemble the […]
Surprise Gene Finding Could Give Pathogens And Toxins A Leg Up In ME/CFS
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Travis Craddock heads Dr. Klimas’s biocomputational modeling team at the Institute for Neuroimmune Medicine (INIM) at Nova Southeastern University. This is the team responsible for crunching the hundreds of thousands of data points gathered from Dr. Klimas’s intensive exercise studies into a massive model of how the […]
Is Fibromyalgia And Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Actually Small Fiber Polyneuropathy ?
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and fibromyalgia (FM) produce so many symptoms that diagnosing them can be difficult for uninformed doctors. While we know that small fiber polyneuropathy (SFPN) (or small fiber neuropathy (SFN) commonly occurs in both these diseases, what I didn’t realize until I read the […]
From The Tahoe Outbreak To COVID-19 Dr. Peterson And Simmaron Take On The Coronavirus – And ME/CFS
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. “Testing is so important to everyone in our community, especially front-line workers and people who are at higher risk of severe disease. Simmaron is excited to serve our neighbors and lead the way to broader testing, so we help keep Nevada safe and learn more about this […]
A Novel Neuroinflammatory Paradigm For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Mackay A, Tate WP. A compromised paraventricular nucleus with a dysfunctional hypothalamus: a novel neuro-inflammatory paradigm for ME/CFS. Int J Immunopathol Pharmacol. 2018:32:1-8. The HPA’s nexus in two important systems – the stress response and the immune system, both of which almost everyone believes are impaired in ME/CFS – […]
From The Tahoe Outbreak To COVID-19 Dr. Peterson And Simmaron Take On The Coronavirus – And ME/CFS
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. “Testing is so important to everyone in our community, especially front-line workers and people who are at higher risk of severe disease. Simmaron is excited to serve our neighbors and lead the way to broader testing, so we help keep Nevada safe and learn more about this […]
Seizing the Moment: International ME/CFS COVID-19 Research Effort Begins
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. “I have sympathy for people with chronic fatigue syndrome now, and I believe this disease fast-tracks you into experiencing these symptoms.” Paul Garner – Infectious Diseases Specialist A lot of infections can trigger chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) but in some ways SARS-CoV-2 is different in ways that reminds […]
The Blood Vessel Crunch: A Unifying Hypothesis For ME/CFS
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. This is another hypothesis paper that gives one hope – and makes one wonder if the authors might have a handle on what’s happening with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The paper proposes that a tantalizingly simple problem – an autoimmune attack on just one receptor – out […]
Explaining ME/CFS ? Prusty / Naviaux Study Ties Infections To Energy Breakdowns
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Unexpected synchronies are always a good sign. Many, of course, are familiar with Bob Naviaux, MD, PhD from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Naviaux’s metabolomic work and his Cell Danger Response (CDR) hypothesis have opened up new possible ways of understanding ME/CFS, autism and other diseases. […]
Will COVID-19 Leave An Explosion Of ME/CFS Cases In Its Wake ?
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Health. The first SARS epidemic in 2003 featuring SARS-CoV now seems like a poor dress rehearsal for today’s SARS CoV-2 outbreak. With just 8,000 cases in total and 774 deaths, (compared to almost 1,000,000 cases and 4,000 plus deaths and rising rapidly) it seems hardly worth including in the same […]
Will COVID-19 Leave An Explosion Of ME/CFS Cases In Its Wake ?
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. The first SARS epidemic in 2003 featuring SARS-CoV now seems like a poor dress rehearsal for today’s SARS CoV-2 outbreak. With just 8,000 cases in total and 774 deaths, (compared to almost 1,000,000 cases and 4,000 plus deaths and rising rapidly) it seems hardly worth including in the same sentence. […]
Ending The Somatization Myth In ME/CFS (Or “Who’s The Deluded One Now” ?)
By Cort Johnson in Health Rising. Ronald Reagan said to Gorbachev, “Take down that wall!” and it did ultimately fall. The ME/CFS version of that might be, “Get rid of those stubborn psychiatric ideas!” It’s a cultural problem. The authors pointed out that anytime a physician sees a patient with unexplained fatigue, their default […]
New Pathways: A Step Towards Fine-Tuning Treatments For ME/CFS ?
By Cort Johnson in Simmaron Research. Most chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) studies focus on females, but for once we have a study contrasting females and males. It makes sense that this group – hailing from Dr. Klimas’s Institute for Neuroimmune Studies, the University of Miami, the Veterans Center in Miami, the University […]