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Unless there's another "hippotherapy," it's a form of Equine-assisted therapy. ["Hippo" is Greek for horse, as in "hippodrome." Hippopotamus actually means "river horse.") From the article, it sounds like horse-riding is used as a form of physical therapy. I would assume that for ME patients...

Doesn't seem like you'd really need twins to conduct this test yourself - just send in two samples from the same person under different names.

Oddly enough, once it became apparent that I was not simply recovering from the flu, the first thing my GP suspected was haemochromatosis. This was in the early 80's prior to the designation of "CFS," and if the neurologist I saw a few weeks later had ever heard of "ME" he certainly didn't tell...

When seeking to challenge those (like the SMC) who would appoint themselves as the arbiters and guardians of "truth," I think a good meme might come in handy. [ "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" / lit. "Who will guard the guards themselves?" / "Who'll watch the watchmen?"] Or am I being too...

Sorry if this is a bit flippant, but when I come across doctors like this who are so certain of their psychological explanations, I'm often reminded of this scene from the 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." In the video above, small town physician, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin...

I once wondered if I might have sleep apnea, so I hung a microphone over my bed and recorded the entire night. What I discovered was not obstructive sleep apnea, but what my doctor called "Cheyne-Stokes respiration." This is apparently a kind of "central sleep apnea," meaning that it is...

Since this adds up to 123%, it's pretty clear that some patients, perhaps many, had multiple "peri-onset events." I'm not really concerned that 39% reported peri-onset "stressful incidents." Chronic stress might well alter the way the body responds to an infection and/or exposure to an...

I remember noticing that both my breathing rate and my heart rate were lower immediately after onset. As @JaimeS said, there was a sense of "forgetting to breathe." I suspect my doctor didn't take my observation of low breathing rate too seriously, since it's something you have more...

History shows that this is not always good advice.

Feel free to start a thread on it, @DokaGirl!

Ironically, rather than being the attention seeking hypochondriacs they are sometime caricatured as, a real issue for ME/CFS patients is the degree to which their experience with the medical profession eventually makes them averse to contact with it. (It certainly has in my case.) It's all but...

I'm not sure if you're looking for Shorter's paper "Chronic fatigue in historical perspective" from the May 1992 CIBA conference, but it can be seen here starting on page 6. The book was originally published in 1993, but this citation seems to say it was first published online in 2007. There's...

The article I linked to above touches on the issue of class in the diagnosis of neurasthenia...

I don't think it accounts for everything, but... Leonard Jason's figure of 422/100,000 (.422%) is only intended as an estimate of the adult US population with CFS. If this current study is not confined to adults, you'd expect it to come up with a somewhat larger number - though a doubling of...

I would have thought so, just because the word conjures up images of 19th century tintypes of women splayed on fainting couches - but it turns out that it was mainly men who were diagnosed with neurasthenia, which was thought be a consequence of the fast-paced, energy-sapping qualities of...

Strange. It's just seems to be the website of a small county newspaper in Montana. It's a 2011 article by a local doctor about how peptic ulcers are now treatable with antibiotics.

According to this article: Of course, there was a time when peptic ulcers were considered a self-reinforcing product of "emotional stress." That time has passed. Has anyone alerted Sir Simon, I wonder?

I've definitely experienced this at times. For me, it's more or less of a "whooshing" sound that might suggest turbulent blood flow. Some believe that it is caused by high blood pressure in the carotid arteries, perhaps due to plaque buildup there - but I've heard this kind of thing...

In Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," Lord Wotton says that he likes to choose his enemies for their good intellects. Unfortunately, even in this regard, it looks like ME patients are once again screwed.

I wonder if you would see signs of hypoxia, like blue lips and fingernail beds, if the blood simply couldn't be delivered in an adequate amount to the smallest vessels - perhaps as a consequence of reduced blood cell deformability, or maybe as an effect of some impairment of nitric oxide's...