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Article: The Long Road: "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Novel" Author Returns to 'Health'

What a powerful post! I can't wait to read more. There truly is a dark side to medicine. I've been fighting The Standard Insurance for long term disability and I am certain their criteria is about the same as UNUM. Very Interesting..........
 
That just shows how desperate the need to find biomarkers for this illness (or illnesses) so that insurance companies use their tricks to deny claims. As always - we really need more research!
 
Merging threads here....

Merry - Today, 06:05 PM
Quite an interesting report. Thanks, Cort, for writing about Caroline Anderson. How lucky that she found that antivirals helped her significantly.

Some of what she says about insurance companies I also saw in Wendell Potter's Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans. Wendell Potter remarks at one point in the book that the eleven million dollar retirement home of one of his former bosses was built with money the company made denying medical claims.
 
There is such an ugly side to 'corporate medicine'. I wonder how that insurance exec sleeps at night in his beautiful 11 million dollar home. I wonder if he wakes up in the middle of the night at times in a cold sweat.

I thought this was amazing

She said 6% of UNUM's claims at one point were due to people with CFS, GWS and FM type patients and it's down to less 1%. That's the result of giving their employees interest in not accepting these claims - to find any way they can to wiggle out of them.
 
Yes, she is still taking methotrexate.....didn't know about the methylation aspect. Dantini does not favor methotrexate because of its possible side effects - but it definitely helped her.

My question is why did she progress so quickly? Either she's just the right person for this treatment, famvir - which is not used so much with CFS because its mainly used for herpes simplex - is a better drug, methotrexate somehow potentiated famvir's effect or......

The food allergy aspect as well - most people don't pay attention to that either.
 
Very interesting! I have had ME/CFS for close to 30 years. But about 20 years ago, I went through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for bilateral breast cancer. For the chemo, I was given a combination of three drugs, one of which was methotrexate. After completing the treatments, the last of which was six months of the chemo, I still had the normal ME/CFS fatigue (I hardly noticed any additional fatigue from the cancer treatments.) Then after a few weeks, I had several months of the best energy I had had in a decade. I have wondered if there was something in the methotrexate or the other two drugs that worked on the ME/CFS fatigue as well as the cancer.
 
Very interesting! I have had ME/CFS for close to 30 years. But about 20 years ago, I went through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for bilateral breast cancer. For the chemo, I was given a combination of three drugs, one of which was methotrexate. After completing the treatments, the last of which was six months of the chemo, I still had the normal ME/CFS fatigue (I hardly noticed any additional fatigue from the cancer treatments.) Then after a few weeks, I had several months of the best energy I had had in a decade. I have wondered if there was something in the methotrexate or the other two drugs that worked on the ME/CFS fatigue as well as the cancer.

French Tulip - how interesting! Have you read the article on Rituximab? What you describe is exactly what happened to another set of CFS patients; they underwent chemotherapy for cancer and following the chemotherapy improved greatly! In fact a study is underway in Norway using Rituximab in CFS.

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/content.php?287-A-Drug-For-ME-CFS-The-Rituximab-Story-possible-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-treatment
 
Just spent the entire weekend on the couch because if I moved I had trouble breathing. Doctor thinks it could be methotrexate induced lung injury. Will be getting a chest xray to see what's up. So anyone thinking of taking methotrexate should weight the risks carefully. They are very real.
 
Just spent the entire weekend on the couch because if I moved I had trouble breathing. Doctor thinks it could be methotrexate induced lung injury. Will be getting a chest xray to see what's up. So anyone thinking of taking methotrexate should weight the risks carefully. They are very real.

Sorry to hear that...but thanks for passing it on...Good luck - I hope it resolves quickly.
 
I had a cousin who had something very similar to CFS who got well while getting cancer treatment.
Her illness slowly returned after cancer treatment. She must have been on methotrexate or retuximab.
Pinky
 
I know some who combined MTX and valcyte due to a second illness. She says she feels better than she has ever had as an adult and her CFS symptoms have went away. She has had some sever opportunistic infections though, likely due to her weakened immune system.