Hi everyone. I'm a friend of Mike VanElzakker, and also a patient of 18(!) years. He learned about Me/CFS through his friendship with me, and for years has been thinking about what the cause could be based on his knowledge of neuroscience. Even though he studies full time (in a different field) and works, he used his spare time for over a year to work on this paper and get it published.
I just wanted to address a few things brought up in the thread. Mike is a neuroscientist, not a clinical psychologist. He's a PhD candidate who studies PTSD, thus his lab falls under the department of psychology. From what I understand his work is largely looking at and analyzing brain scans.
I think the people on the thread did a great job of explaining sickness behavior and psychoneuroimmunology, terms that were off-putting to me as a patient at first. But, yeah, sickness behavior is just a research term to describe what people and animals do when they get in infection - they feel crappy and get aches and chills, maybe a fever, they lie down and rest. (I tried to link to wikipedia in that sentence but I'm not sure if it did it right!) It's involuntary.
When you get sick, the immune system tells the vagus nerve which tells the brain, so in this case it's psycho (brain) neuro (vagus nerve) immunology (response to infection.)
So, with this paper Mike is doing what people do in science - proposing an theory. The cause of this disease has remained elusive for so long and it's beyond frustrating that after thirty years that it is still a diagnosis of exclusion, that we still don't have a diagnostic toolkit at the primary care level. Mike understands that, he's a passionate and empathetic person who wants patients to have diagnostics and treatment options. I'm so glad that he has pitched in his theory and I hope more young scientists become interested in the field too.