'Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth' by Keith Kahn-Harris

I don't think there is a continuum of our disease, not with the healthy population at least. Everyone with MS has antibodies to myelin not present in the general population. How severe an individual's MS expresses is down to how many neurons are involved and which ones they are. In ME it is probably the same with cells where aerobic respiration is broken.

Type 2 diabetes is not a continuum, some people are born with a certain genetic makeup which handles sugars differently. This process can be overwhelmed by an amount of carbohydrates which a different pancreas can handled efficiently. There is a feeling in the diabetes community that the drug companies are interested in treating the disease rather than looking at causes. If they looked at the origins they could detect people in the early stages and prevent the pancreas burning out.

In ME there is always a sudden onset where something in the body breaks but the symptoms of that onset can be immediate or gradually get worse. The early reports spoke about subclinical or trivial infections leading to a gradual ill health.

In most illnesses there is a point at which they start, a cell becomes cancerous or a bacteria burrows into the stomach wall and lets acid in.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as "mild" ME. As we know more about the breakdown of aerobic respiration we will think about it differently. If we had a way of detecting whatever causes it people could monitor what they do to keep under their limit. Ironically, that would be more of a social issue as I can rest much more as an elderly granny than I could as a young mother!

We may reach a point where we can sort out what disease we all have and there will be no more "ME" as such, chronic fatigue will certainly be seen as a symptom and the cause found in each case, instead of being shuffled off as "ME/CFS" if you have it for more than 6 months.

 

What I meant by a continuum is that the illness is defined as a threshold of a variable which is also present in the healthy population. In the case of type two diabetes the variable is blood glucose. There is a continuum of blood glucose levels from healthy to diabetic.

As I said, I don’t think we know enough about ME/CFS to know if there is a continuum or not. It may be that there are subgroups in which there is a continuum and others in which there is not. Hopefully biomedical research will provide answers to these questions before too long.

 

Which begs a question, whether that is likely to be the case for those - like my wife - whose ME onset was pretty sudden and apparently triggered by a combination of virus and post-operative recovery. Does type-2 diabetes suddenly "flip" into an illness state? Either by the illness "flipping in" with just a small change in blood glucose? Or by the blood glucose level jumping suddenly once it gets to a certain threshold? Or does diabetes not behave like that? Could sudden onset ME still be triggered as part of a progressively changing variable?

 

Curious quick question, did your wife receive blood during her operation?

 

No.

 

Let's not forget that ME impacts on the hormones endocrine system and HPA access.

This undoubtedly lowers anyone's capacity to deal with "stressors"- whether it be illness, viral, bacterial, cognitive/social,- "emotional", trauma, usual life stresses, decision making etc
(I use the work "stressors" advisedly as "stress" has to many connotations.
A weakened adrenal/thyroid/pituitary system, with identified secondary insufficiency plays havoc with an individual's capacity to deal with anything at all in my experience.