Holland, MI — Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Solutions of West Michigan is offering support and educational opportunities for patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals starting Jan. 27.
The advocacy group is dedicated to helping patients of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome improve their quality of life.
A Mid Wales doctor who was suspended from the medical register for a year because of the potential risk she posed to patients has had the order lifted by the General Medical Council.
The GMC this week lifted Dr Sarah Myhill’s suspension and restored her licence to practise medicine, subject to conditions.
http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2011/01/08/doctor-gets-her-practice-licence-back/
Dr Myhill, a high profile GP based in Llangunllo, UK, has been restored her license to practise following the threat of High Court legal action. Myhill, 52 and based in Llangunllo, near Knighton, was suspended by the GMC in October last year. She was alleged to have provided “inappropriate” treatment to a patient in 2009 after she recommended vitamin and magnesium injections for suspected chronic fatigue syndrome.
More and more, noise sensitivity is being recognized as part of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s a very real problem for many of us — in a recent poll here, it was one of the top sensitivities people listed.
Noise sensitivity can cause problems at work and in social situations, or just about any time we’re in public. It might be the volume level alone, it might be a repetitive sound, or it might be a multitude of sounds — no matter the source, it can cause anxiety, panic, and even widespread pain as the receptors in our brains become overwhelmed.
NHS bosses have been accused of putting residents’ health at risk by delaying hospital appointments and scrapping services in a desperate bid to save millions.
People across Brentwood and Billericay now face new “extended waiting times” of at least 14 weeks for all routine appointments, as part of a move that will save the cash-strapped primary care trust an estimated £8 million.
A whole host of services have been axed, which will force patients to look to the private sector for specialist care.
Last year I saw a patient who had returned from her Christmas vacation complaining of persistent dizziness and fatigue that had not improved for over a year.
Before visiting my office she had consulted three other doctors but no cause for the dizziness was found.
When I questioned her about the vacation, which took place at a Caribbean resort, I discovered that she had experienced a transient episode of diarrhea there and since returning home had been unusually constipated and gassy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-galland-md/intestinal-parasites_b_804516.html
Chronic fatigue syndrome is an idiopathic syndrome widely suspected of having an infectious or immune etiology. We applied an unbiased metagenomic approach to try to identify known or novel infectious agents in the serum of 45 cases with chronic fatigue syndrome or idiopathic chronic fatigue.
In Science Times, David Tuller reports on recent developments surrounding chronic fatigue syndrome, a mysterious illness of unknown cause that may be linked to a virus. In December, a medical advisory panel suggested that the Food and Drug Administration ban blood donations by people with a history of C.F.S., a move that was hailed by many patients as a sign that their illness was finally being taken seriously.
Becoming a richer, more powerful country has rarely been relaxing. In the magazine this week, I write about the advent of a new era of psychology in China, which reflects the mounting pressures on ordinary citizens in an age of prosperity. There is precedent here. In 1881, at the height of the American industrial revolution, New York doctor George Beard published “American Nervousness,” about the fraying effects of modern life.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/01/americanitis-vs-chinitis.html/
AMERICAN author Laura Hillenbrand fascinated by long shots who come from behind to win the day. Her own successful writing career is something of a long shot, given that she suffers from debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
In the bestselling Seabiscuit, she told the story of a racehorse that overcame injuries to become a champion. In her new biography Unbroken, she writes about Louis Zamperini, whose life has seen a series of triumphs over seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
A virus previously thought to be linked to a baffling condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome is not the cause of the disease, scientists said on Monday after their study found previous research was contaminated in the lab.
Researchers from University College London, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Oxford University said cell samples from patients in earlier studies were contaminated with the virus, known as XMRV, which is found in the DNA of mice.
Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of patients seeking health check-ups or medical consultations. These patients believe they may have some serious illness such as cancer because they usually did the same work without any difficulty, but now feel fatigue.
Actually, tiredness through overwork and stress for a long period of time is the most common reason for chronic fatigue. A person can easily get exhausted at any point in life through an increased workload and stress as strength decreases due to aging. Men usually can handle their given workload even though they are tired. They are suffering from lack of sleep and rest because they are too busy but not because of insomnia. There are no other specific symptoms except fatigue. Fatigue can be managed by taking enough rest and sleep, reducing one’s workload according to age and physical fitness.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/12/147_78655.html
When you talk to people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, it doesn’t take long to collect horror stories about doctors and how many of them treat us. They don’t believe us; they think we’re lazy, crazy or drug seeking; they dismiss our diagnoses and refuse to test or treat us.
I recently had an eye-opening experience — it’s not just us!
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a complex, multi-symptom illness with a multisystem pathogenesis involving alterations in the nervous, endocrine and immune systems. Abnormalities in stress responses have been identified as potential triggers or mediators of CFS symptoms.
This study focused on the stress mediator neuropeptide Y (NPY). We hypothesized that NPY would be a useful biomarker for CFS.
London: Dark chocolate may ease the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, says a new research.
It is characterised by extreme, persistent fatigue for six months or more with other problems as muscle pain, headaches and poor memory.
Dark chocolate is rich in chemicals known to increase signals carried around the brain but this is thought to be the first time the confection has been found to help symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, a newspaper reported.
http://www.zeenews.com/news677521.html
A Shropshire mother fears her 20-year-old son – who is bedridden with the chronic illness ME and has to be spoon fed – could die after health chiefs refused to send him for treatment at a specialist unit.
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disabling disease with unknown etiology. There is accumulating evidence of altered cardiovascular autonomic responses to different somatic stressors, in particular orthostatic stress, whereas autonomic responses to mental stress remain to be investigated.
I just learned a lesson I wanted to share with all my fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome friends — always double check what your test results mean!
I have autoimmune thyroid disease and recently had a flare up of symptoms. My regular doctor is out of town, but I happened to have a check-up with my rheumatologist. When she brought up getting some lab tests done, I asked her to add in a TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) test. I got a letter in the mail with my results, which said my TSH level was 3.5 and therefore well within the “normal” range of .5 to 5.5.
A fascinating article has just been published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism on the role that gut inflammation may play in the onset and maintenance of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). According to the article, one of the factors behind this area of inquiry is the overlap between CFS and IBS.
http://ibs.about.com/b/2010/12/19/gut-inflammation-cfs-ibs.htm
A virus that originates in mice, which last year was hailed as a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME, is not the cause of the disease, say scientists.
Four papers published by the journal Retrovirology all come to the conclusion that the finding of the mouse virus XMRV in human cell samples was not the breakthrough that researchers and doctors had hoped for. Further research suggests that the samples were contaminated with mouse DNA.
Other people’s requests, demands and expectations can run us ragged, especially when those people don’t understand how limited we are because of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. As hard as it is, at some point we need to start saying, “no.”
http://chronicfatigue.about.com/
In a stirring return to the pool, Olympic bronze medallist Cate Campbell claimed the 50 metres freestyle title at the Queensland swimming championships in Brisbane on Monday night – five months after fears her career may be over.
And the 18-year-old capped her comeback with a win over none other than the girl who had succeeded her as Australia’s sprint queen, Yolane Kukla.
http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8182370
Looking for a new job is especially tough right now — I know plenty of healthy people who are struggling with it — and when you have a chronic illness like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, you face some additional complications.
Not only do we need to consider what jobs are a good fit for our skills and our symptoms, we need to think about when we’re going to bring up our health problems with a new or prospective employer. I recently came across a really good article on this topic on CNNMoney.com that offers expert guidance for what to do during the interview process.
LACEY, Wash.- – During our interview, Shoiban McElwee struggles to stand up from the couch.
“Recently, I’ve been spending between 16 to 18 hours a day sleeping,” says McElwee as she walks to the kitchen and carefully pours close to a dozen prescription pills and supplements. McElwee says she has chronic fatigue syndrome.
“Comparing this level of fatigue to tired is like comparing a lit match to a nuclear explosion,” she says.
We have fibromyalgia (FMS) and chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) — aren’t we sick enough already? Yes we are, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to all the bugs that go around, and this is an especially “buggy” time of year. Whether you get a bad case of it or not, you’re likely to feel it more than most people, and illness can trigger a flare.
On Nov 8, 2010, a report on CDC-funded research by Nater et al. – “Personality Features and Personality Disorders in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Population-Based Study” – was published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
A reading of the report reveals that in fact Nater et al. found no more frequency of maladaptive personality traits in their CFS cohort than in those with other chronic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis (i.e., debilitating illnesses are punishing), and that the large majority of their CFS patient cohort had no symptoms of personality disorder.
http://www.prohealth.com/library/showarticle.cfm?libid=15783
Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune included a long feature story by reporters Patricia Callahan and Trine Tsouderos on a nationwide scare over a non-existent malady called chronic Lyme disease.
ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross, who treated Lyme disease when he practiced as a rheumatologist, comments that, “while it can sometimes be difficult to diagnose, Lyme disease is very real. It is transmitted by the bite of a deer tick, typically in the northeast and in Wisconsin and Minnesota, usually during the summer months. An infected tick transmits the Lyme bacterium in its bite, but the condition is usually responsive to a variety of oral antibiotics. On rare occasions, intravenous treatment is required.”
According to Wikipedia, the glucocorticoid receptor is the receptor that cortisol and other glucocorticoids bind to. It “is expressed in almost every cell of the body and regulates genes controlling development, metabolism, and immune response.”]
Hypocortisolism is a frequent finding in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and could play an explanatory role in the development of illness symptomatology.
Dark chocolate may ease the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Chronic fatigue is characterised by extreme, persistent fatigue for six months or more with other problems as muscle pain, headaches and poor memory.
Dark chocolate is rich in chemicals known to increase signals carried around the brain but its impact on chronic fatigue syndrome has not been studied previously. To study this, researchers from Britain tested a group of ten patients with a severe form of the disease.
In an unprecedented move, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients published a half-page ad in The Washington Post today. The ad brings attention to new, HIV-like retroviruses, including XMRV, which have been linked to CFS and aggressive prostate cancer, and have been detected in healthy blood donors.
In late 2009, the FDA issued a Complete Response Letter saying Ampligen would not become the first ever drug approved for chronic fatigue syndrome — at least, not yet. The letter listed several things the company could do to increase its odds of approval and gave them a year to do get those things accomplished.
http://chronicfatigue.about.com
Tests determining whether people are fit to work are to be reformed to offer more support and to take greater account of mental health conditions.
An independent review of the Work Capability Assessment, introduced in 2008, has proposed substantial changes to make it “fairer and more effective”.