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"Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in." - GK Chesterton Of course, it doesn't always work. :)

Speculation: Just out of curiosity, I wondered if sleep deprivation might increase tryptophan. I guess I was thinking that the body might try to force sleep by producing more (if it can produce more). Or perhaps tryptophan is "consumed" during sleep - so its level would rise if you didn't...

"The best thing I’ve done from a sociological and community standpoint was to embrace the activists. Instead of rejecting them, I listened to them. I remember looking out a window and people on the lawn of the NIH were throwing smoke bombs. The Montgomery County Police were ready to arrest them...

Signert!

I would hate to speculate about such a conversation, but... "Hey, the University just got a $9.6 million grant from the NIH to search for the biological causes of ME/CFS. Thanks for inviting speakers here who probably think we should give it back. That's great publicity for us."

Seems like an effect like the "tilted hallway" I posted above might be caused by a problem with the 4th cranial nerve, aka the "Trochlear Nerve." Unlike the other eleven, multi-functional cranial nerves, the only thing the 4th cranial nerve controls is the muscle that rotates the eye around...

And assuming they are talking about physical trauma/injury leading to vestibular problems (which can happen), how do they explain the "epidemics"?

I assume by "with a history of trauma" they mean something along the lines of a physical injury, like a blow to the head or some other kinetic force on the body. I really don't recall experiencing anything like that in the months prior to onset - and it's the kind of thing that I, or my...

So, do they actually destroy the gut's microbiome prior to FMT, or do they just empty the gut? This is kind of glossed over in what I've read and I'm not certain that they are the same thing. FMT can frequently cure C. difficile infection, but C. diff is not normally present in the gut...

Well, my first ME symptom was an acute attack of "vertigo," and balance problems continued to be a major symptom for years afterward. Still, it's going to take a whole lot of convincing for me to accept that all the subsequent symptoms were just downstream effects from a problem of the...

Can you imagine telling AIDS patients, in the era before effective treatments were available, that their activism was an indicator that they were not all that sick? [It wouldn't shock me if that happened, though.]

They divided the number of messages posted on a selection of Norwegian health forums in one week by the number of thousands of people in Norway who have the condition. This seems to be how they are arriving at ME having "more than ten times the relative activity of any other disorder or...

My impression is that, when he said he felt like he'd been looking over his shoulder for the last five years, it was a comment about how the 2013 PACE trial results and their controversy had sucked all the oxygen out of the room during that period, forcing them to look backward and making it...

It is possible to do a documentary on the potential of a scientific breakthrough. You give the background/history of the subject in question. You interview scientists/researchers on the approaches they are developing and why they think they will work. You highlight the controversy and the...

I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but can you imagine this happening under the tenure of the CDC's Dr. William Reeves (who unexpectedly died in the summer of 2012) ? To quote German physicist Max Planck, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them...

It's interesting that about half of the faculty connected to this conference (several from Germany) seem to specialize in "Psychosomatic Medicine." Apparently the term "psychosomatic" is so loaded that the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) no longer offers board certification...

There was an article about this today in USA Today (10/08/18). In the last four years, the CDC has received 362 reports of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) cases. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/10/08/rare-polio-like-disorder-sickens-6-children-minnesota/1563295002/

I think I dreamed I was at this conference...

There were 9 suspected cases in children (1 to 18) in Denver, Colorado in August/September 2014, according the Wikipedia article on acute flaccid myelitis. By October 2014, 100+ cases had been reported across the US.

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to come up with some alternative name for ME/CFS that did not involve "fatigue" or "exhaustion." The problem with those words is that they are predicated on "exertion." Although people with ME worsen with exertion, my experience with ME is one of being in a...