Reading matter

Late last year my doctor decided I might have CFS. Over the years I and the NHS have been through a whole lot of options, including anaemia, diabetes, stomach ulcer, gastroenteritis, thyroid dysfunction, anxiety, depression and breathing disorders. I've been recommended dietary changes (it's not like I stuff myself with junk food; the Bell fridge has known the odd green vegetable). I've tried meditation and breathing exercises; trouble is every time I concentrate on my breathing I start getting a panic attack. Then there was the injunction to take more exercise, so I took up jogging, which may have made the CFS worse but certainly didn't make it any better. It also did my knee in, so that stopped that. All in all, I was pretty relieved to have any kind of label, even a provisional one.

So I went home, of course, and started looking things up on the net. The ME Association turned up, and a friend recommended this article from Prohealth. There's lots else out there; let me know if you've found anything particularly useful. I've waded through tons of offers for dubious potential treatments, but they all look like snake oil. If you have CFS, what works for you?

When I got the formal diagnosis, the friendly immunologist recommended a couple of books. Based on their Amazon ratings, I chose the one by Campling and Sharpe. So far I've read the first seven chapters. It's clearly written and laid out, easy to follow and not too much at once. I've ground to a halt at the moment (more on that later), but for all that I'd recommend it.

The afternoon after my diagnosis, being a scientist by training, I went to PubMed, one of the big databases of scientific journal articles, to read the abstracts of papers on CFS. It's "a profound and disabling condition", apparently. No shit Sherlock. It's complicated. They don't know much about it. Lots of ideas, and lots of depressing statistics about recovery rates. After a while I got very, very fed up with reading about what it was probably doing to my body, and my brain, and all the other things I might be more likely to get thanks to having CFS. Still, there was one particularly interesting paper which sounded a bit more hopeful. I'll post the abstract.