Friday, March 21, 2014
Dr. Jose Montoya and the Stanford ME/CFS Symposium
It is March 19, 2014 and I have come to Palo Alto for a one-day conference at Stanford University. The weather here is ideal - sunny and warm. I take the long, familiar walk up the allee to the conference - past the Caltrain station, past the museum. This is familiar territory to me, having been here many times in the past - for much different purposes. The air is full of anticipation. It is exciting to come to a major university for an ME/CFS conference.
This conference is the product of one remarkable person: Dr. Jose Montoya.
Dr. Montoya has single-handedly forged this ME/CFS research collaboration at Stanford. There is nothing of its breadth and scope anywhere else in the world.
Seven years ago or more, Dr. Montoya, an infectious disease doctor, stumbled upon ME/CFS. At that time, his burgeoning interest in this illness did not seem to be particularly welcome to his colleagues at Stanford. An outsider might have given Dr. Montoya no chance of making headway in this environment. Why would an infectious disease doctor want to waste their time on CFS? In spite of this resistance, Dr. Montoya forged ahead - and he has created a very strong collaborative research team, including the likes of Dr. Ron Davis. It is a remarkable story.
The series of conference lectures was impressive. The morning’s session included Dr. Jarred Younger’s “Daily Fluctuations of Cytokines in ME/CFS patients,” and the afternoon was highlighted by a presentation by Marcie and Mark Zinn entitled “Quantitative EEG studies Suggest Subcortical Pathology in ME/CFS." (Others,
here, and
here, will present a more detailed explanation of these lectures and the scientific strengths of this conference.)
The final two lectures were what I had come to see: Jose Montoya and Ian Lipkin.
Read more: http://cfspatientadvocate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/dr-jose-montoya-and-stanford-mecfs.html
