With almost surgical precision.
My mom had CFS in the 1990s, and I could see that allopathy could do nothing for her. That's how I ended up in the only MS program in the US for alternative medicine. For all their woo (and yes... there was intense woo) there were enough hard-science minds teaching there that I learned how to dissect and judge scientific articles, and it was there that I learned my first real laboratory skills. Also how the shape of chemicals relates to their function in the body. 10+ years teaching science made me more confident in the basics.
But I think that would've all been a load of poo if it hadn't been for a sea-change in my behavior. At first, I was thinking that I ought to simply wait to see what a physician would say. I refused to take anything, even OTC, because I was worried it would shift my symptoms in a way that made me tougher to diagnose. I don't remember what the tripping point was, exactly, but there was a
moment, followed by lots of
. I tested meds empirically, going off and on them multiple times to ensure to the best of my ability that they were actually doing what I thought they were. Since different stages of the disease are different, I occasionally repeated the process and was able to eliminate something that used to help out, but no longer did. I kept meticulous symptom diaries. Made some dramatic changes in diet and kept diarying on.
I'm not cured, but me at onset versus me now is no comparison. I'm working full-time in person in a lab. I work from home some days when all I have to do is write, to husband my energy -- but beyond that, I'm almost living the life of a well person.
I don't know where I would be if I didn't have science background. It would not have been pretty.
As I always say when I talk about how much I'm improved, know that I'm aware that there are those of you out there who have done everything "right" and still aren't any better. I'm sorry -- I don't know what separates us. I wish I did.
-J