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Tuesday, July 08, 2003http://www.aafp.org/afp/20020315/1083.html It is known that CFS is a heterogeneous disorder possibly involving an interaction of biologic systems. Similarities with fibromyalgia exist and concomitant illnesses include irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and headaches. Therefore, treatment of CFS may be variable and should be tailored to each patient. Therapy should include exercise, diet, good sleep hygiene, antidepressants, and other medications, depending on the patient's presentation. ...Regional cerebral flow studies24 using single photon emission computed tomography analysis have shown impaired regional cerebral blood flow in patients with CFS compared with healthy control subjects. A later study25 using positron emission tomography analysis compared patients who had CFS and no history of depression with clinically depressed patients who had no history of CFS; the study found altered frontal cortical metabolism in both patients with CFS and patients with depression compared with healthy control subjects. Whether the functional impairment in patients with CFS is caused by a concurrent psychiatric illness is still inconclusive. CDC info Fatigue: A reader pointed me to a New Yorker article by Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, about her experience with a mystery illness that has left her incapacitated for much of the past sixteen years. The article isn't available on line, but a Diane Rehm inteview about it is. (scroll down to July 3) The interview covers everything and tells the exact same story as the New Yorker article. There's many an unsympathetic doctor in the article, all of whom are tusked, tusked over by Diane Rehm, Ms. Hillenbrand, and Ms. Hillenbrand's internist in the interview. Stupid doctors. Blind asses. Ms. Hillenbrand has now been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Every medical doctor she saw in the late 1980's, when her illness began, felt her problem was more psychiatric than physical. Every doctor, that is, except one psychiatrist, who told her the problem was a "serious medical illness." It's easy now to look back and deride those doctors, but in the late 1980's chronic fatigue syndrome was anything but a definitive diagnosis, much more controversial than it is today. Every age has its vague illnesses which are defined more by symptom complexes than by known disease processes. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was neurasthenia. Back then, a lot of people with a lot of different diseases got lumped into the category of neurasthenia. People with multiple sclerosis, for example. Today, we can diagnose multiple sclerosis, so those patients are in no danger posted by Sydney on 7/08/2003 08:25:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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