As you can guess, I have been thinking a lot about illnesses lately. Going back to my twenties, I went down with chicken pox, which was really nasty, and a few years later a pretty bad flu. In each case I woke up one morning knowing the infection had gone, but feeling utterly drained and grotty – much like ME. That led me to wonder whether there has been much study on biomarkers when people are on this "recovering" phase, how much is understood of what is happening, and what bodily processes swing into action to get folk back to normal. I know it would be a weird kind of study. Could that give a lead into why we feel as we do, and perhaps treatments that may help with symptoms? Or am I totally addled?
If you take PolyBio's or Jarred Younger's explanation model it could be the primed microglia or the vagus sensing remains of viral reservoirs or inflammation in your body and sending a signal to the brain stem where the nuclei responsible for the sickness behaviour (“flu-like feeling” etc) are. Just a thought.
I think this is the approach of Naviaux with his theoretical concept of the healing cycle, which then might be broken in ME. I though don´t know how far he has come so far in producing any (general) empirical results.