Dr Cheney March 2013 lecture videos on CFS Patient Advocate blog

[Sasha]

Good stuff as always from this blog:

http://cfspatientadvocate.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/paul-cheney-lecture-march-22-2013.html

Too much for my poor brain at the moment but looks well worth a watch - three hours!

 

[slayadragon]

Those who have FB can read my notes from Cheney's presentation here:

https://www.facebook.com/lisa.petrison/posts/4530144744041​

 

[Ember]

Too much for my poor brain at the moment but looks well worth a watch - three hours!

These videos are well-worth watching—all three hours. I've posted a couple of quotations on other threads here and here.

 

[Ember]

Those who have FB can read my notes from Cheney's presentation here: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.petrison/posts/4530144744041

Your comments and notes have been posted now on the CFS Patient Advocate blog. Thanks!

I appreciate too Dr. Cheney's comments on deconditioning and crashing. In discussing cellular energy defects in patients, he describes a study from the '90s in exercise ergometry with gas analysis. Mean VO2 max at peak exercise is plotted at 106% for normal controls and compared with 67% for patients: “Although there's a little overlap with couch potatoes, some of these people are incredibly low.” Responding to an argument that “this isn't really an energy problem; they just aren't doing anything,” Dr. Cheney says:

If you study deconditioning, you rarely get below the 85th percentile. So when you fall below 85 percentile, you have an organic process. You can't get there simply by being deconditioned. So there's something terrible going on in oxygen utilization and therefore something wrong with your oxygen production system (Paul Cheney Seminar – Part 1 at 14:00).

When asked later whether crashing happens with other diseases, Dr. Cheney responds:

There are a lot of diseases that have chronic fatigue. In fact, most chronic illnesses have an element of chronic fatigue. But often in those diseases, people push through it. My patients will do minimal effort, like just walking across the room. Or they'll fix dinner and they'll have stood too long, and they're wiped out for days just doing this minimal effort. And I don't know of another disease that looks quite like that, but which also demonstrates severe cognitive derangement and abnormal neurological findings and has some of the other features that I've been talking about (Paul Cheney Seminar – Q&A at 16:55).

 

[Sing]

I found Dr. Cheney's talk extremely good and am going to listen to the whole thing again taking notes. I have OI, chest pain, low oxygen, the hole in my heart, the down-regulated endocrine system and the rest of the picture he describes and explains to a degree which was both new to me and very helpful. It makes sense how our bodies are compensating all along the line for the chain of adverse consequences which follow some unknown problem in the redox system for mitochondrial energy production. My memory is that this is what he said, and that he had not gotten any farther in the research.

His main point was that our systems are so down regulated in order to save our lives. He said that stimulating our systems makes us worse. This includes correcting the usual hypothyroid condition. Taking oxygen or CoQ10 or some of the other supplements, while temporarily helpful, also end up making a lot of us worse. This is because they put more pressure on a dysfunctional redox system.

I have felt as though I have been engaged physically in elaborate strategies of compensation on various levels. I am on the back up plan. And then it has become the back up plan for the back up plan. But I wonder, when you get to your last, most expensive or most inefficient fall back strategies, then what? You "drop off the twig", as the English say.

 

[Chris]

Great stuff--many thanks! And a useful warning against using too many agents of change before the whole thing is fully understood--much of what he says here elaborates on what he said in the earlier DVD "Is Oxygen the Problem," but of course the Gc-MAF stuff is all new. Anyone mixing yogurts and kefirs to see what happens? Or vegetable ferments?

He does appear to be very interested in bugs that reactivate HERVs, and maybe that will prove the causative agent--but how would that be treated? Great to hear from him again--he is still one of the really good minds working on this stuff, and I do appreciate his warnings against things that are aimed simply at relieving one symptom. Chris