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    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

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What induced your ME?

godlovesatrier

Senior Member
Messages
2,554
Location
United Kingdom
Interesting replies. After going on a paleo diet after about 8 months of ME symptoms I became severely I'll with bacterial tonsilltius though part of me is glad it wasn't viral despite how painful it was. This infected both my wisdom teeth which I had to get extracted. The thing is I went on blood anti biotics and standard antibiotics (I forget the name but the duration was 2 weeks) and this did mess up my digestion causing me very bad ibs and discomfort (for what must have been a year after) but my recovery from me continued thereafter without slowing. I do believe the introduction of dog dander and changing environment forced my body to adapt to a new set of stressors and I wonder if this actually helped it recover. I am now however in a relapse and this time whenever I do anything taxing I have a crash the next day. One thing I do fairly relgiously is do nothing and take almost everything if I get a sore throat/bad cold. To stop my body from falling back into severe ME. However the anti biotics for me didn't seem to make anything worse. Just ruined my digestion and my colon for a good year post. Seems to be almost back to normal now.
 

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,740
Location
Alberta
My earlier reply was that mine was caused by type IV food sensitivity. Recently I started reading "Plague" (about research showing that ME/CFS was caused by XMRV; now discredited) and read how many people got their ME/CFS following a vaccination. I kind of passed over that, because I hadn't had any vaccination, but then I realized that I had gotten a vaccination: tetanus booster. I tried to figure out when I had the vaccine, and while I'm not sure how far in advance of the type IV response, I do remember that it was in advance, and months rather than years. I think if it was only weeks, I would have linked the two.

So, if ME/CFS develops anything like the retrovirus hypothesis, it may be that I had latent ME/CFS, and the tetanus booster triggered it into full form, which in turn made my t-cell hyperactive and reacting to foods. It seems likely that the type IV sensitivity was due to dysbiosis, since it disappeared 2.5 years later after food poisoning, which would have drastically altered my microbiome.