Chronic fatigue syndrome: Gradually figuring out what ’s wrong

In 1983, a health professional in her 30s walked into my office and said, “I’ve been healthy all of my life. A year ago, I came down with some kind of virus — sore throat, aching muscles, swollen lymph glands, fever. My fatigue was so bad I was in bed for nearly a week. Many of the symptoms gradually improved, but the terrible fatigue and difficulty thinking have not gotten better. They’re so bad I can’t fulfill my responsibilities at home or at work. This illness is affecting my brain, stealing my energy, and affecting my immune system. It’s keeping me from realizing my dreams.” There’s a piece of advice attributed to a famous physician, William Osler, that every medical student probably has heard: “Listen to your patient. The patient is telling you the diagnosis.” But I wasn’t sure it applied in this case. What we knew then First of all, the textbooks of medicine didn’t describe an illness like this. In addition, all the usual laboratory tests to screen for various diseases came back normal. At this point, a doctor has two choices: decide to believe the patient and keep searching to find what is wrong, or to tell the patient, “There is nothing wrong.” Indeed, some doctors seeing people like my patient did just that, adding insult to injury. Fortunately, many physicians and biomedical scientists around the world became interested in this illness, and over 9,000 scientific studies have been published in the past 35 years. The Institute of Medicine ...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Fatigue Health Source Type: blogs