Friday, a couple of pints gave me soooo much energy and made me feel completely normal for a few hours. Also strangely enough it would leave me without morning Fibromyalgia pain the next morning - ...
{Sidenote: it's funny that Wessely once wrote that Alcohol avoidance was a component of ME/CFS}
It´s almost the same with me, but I differ in the conclusion.
When I was in my later 10th I used to drink beer quit often. One time there happend some strange thing (I liked to play chess, and to people who had about the same horizon on that game I lost to about 66%, I didn´t mind). So, I had drunken a first beer when suddenly a chess friend turned up. And nowe, the more beer I drank the better grew my playing.
In my very early 20s I stopped drinking beer wanting other things to do (as alcohol normaly still disabled me more than it anabled me). Now I had mostly periods where it took my out of balance (but that happend with other things as well).
After doxycycline for three weeks when I was 28 I couldn´t drink for 20 month any beer. After I had got the illness quit severe in 2001 it didn´t make any sense to drink beer.
Then I got the difficult improvement since aug 2015.
In jan 2016 I have drunken beer for the first time after five years, and it was not a good and not a bad effect.
In mart 2016 I felt the next day good after having drunken 0.9l beer (which amount became a standard). I tried other alcoholics (which I never realy liked) and no effect or even a bad one occured. But beer was still fine, especially the next day. I also could try to ride bike for long distances sometimes because if I was going to crash I could drink 0.4l beer of 5% and 0.4l of 2.5% and could go on, sports and beer (but it caused PEM for the next ten days, which hadn´t occured in days I felt worse!).
All the effect lasted for about 16-22 months and has now vanished, whereas I am still improving under difficult circumstances, i.e. symptoms. All for this 22 months I could/can not drink beer in the evenning, I would not be able to sleep.
After six months drinking a second time of my life, I found: The more hops within the beer the better. Since then I drank beer without alcohol as well, but with smaller effect (mainly 1l a day). I tried tea from hops, but it did even bad (I blame the manganese which would be just to much). The complete story worked for such a long time no other (positive) non-supplement treatment was able to by very far.
I stopped drinking beer for days and weeks by force prevanting any addictance. Since half a year I stop autmatically for periods. The months to come every beer will do some harm, as I know my feelings already by earlier times.
So I think it has to do mainly with how the different types of synapses are standing to each other, influenced by changeable strenght of immuneactivitiy.
After all I would guess, along with Jonathan Edwards here somewhere, that there isn´t any serious problem with the gut (even if you were suffering from morbus cohn as he pointed out).
... And actually it goes well with the food, too...