Being as I am a tree-lover, I'm not real thrilled with anything that requires killing trees wholesale to extract. My understanding is its action is very similar to grape seed extract, having many of the same ingredients - there's an article about that
here. Since grape seeds are quite renewable, in fact are around in quantity every year and would be a waste product otherwise, that's what I'd look into, although I'm not sure if either grape seed extract or pycnogenol are radically different from other antioxidants such as alpha lipoic acid and resveratrol. There seems to be a sort of style element in which antioxidants are currently considered coolest, but I'm not sure that means much for us.
I did find a couple of non-commerical articles on grape seed extract and CFIDS by googling. Here's one on using
grape seed extract for pain in CFIDS. I found another one listing it in nutrients recommended for FM, but it didn't give any details.
Here is a web site by someone who has CFIDS and uses grape seed extract for increasing platelet activity safely, i.e. getting the blood "unsticky" so it circulates to where it's supposed to circulate to. There's also a lot of interesting info on their health worker's theories about some of the CFS mechanisms. He had very liberal health insurance from Microsoft, so he, his wife, and kid all got extensive testing and could experiment with a lot of things.