Unfortunately, pacing, yoga and nutrition does not cure the pathology of PEM.
Well if you read the original Daily Mail yoga article, you'll find that the former ME/CFS patient is now running half marathons, so I think that would probably count as curing the pathology of PEM.
For those who are objecting to the validity of a yoga treatment of ME/CFS: would you say your motivation for this objection is scientific, or political?
Many ME/CFS patients on this forum, myself included, are of the opinion that graded exercise therapy (GET) is greatly overhyped, has dubious studies like the PACE study behind it, probably does not work for most patients, may well be harmful for some, and certainly should not be one of the main standard treatments offered by the NHS to ME/CFS patients.
In addition, GET/CBT are linked to the disability insurance industry lobbying that tries to cast ME/CFS as psychogenic disease so that insurance companies can avoid disability payouts to ME/CFS patients. All good reasons for taking a dim view of graded exercise therapy.
So it is perhaps understandable (but not excusable) that patients may be politically opposed to the idea that yoga, which some may construe as just another form of exercise, can be effective as a treatment for ME/CFS, even for just a small subset of patients.
However, politics is one thing, and truth is another. If it is true that these patients had ME/CFS and their disease was ameliorated or put into remission by yoga, would you want to suppress that fact just for political purposes?
Let's look at the possible scientific plausibility of this yoga treatment for ME/CFS:
• First of all, yoga is a bit more than just exercise: it is a method of cultivating the mind through the body. I used to do a lot of yoga before I developed ME/CFS, and I can vouch for the fact that it profoundly improves mental and cognitive functioning. And echoing what Dan Moricoli said in Cort's article: heavy-duty aerobics-type workout yogas (which are really a perversion of the original spiritual concept) do not have any affect on the mind at all, I found; whereas very lightweight, gentle and subtle yoga, which expends far less energy, does have profound spiritual and mental effects.
• Secondly, yoga can modulate the
autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve, as
this Google search will show. So given the autonomic dysfunction in ME/CFS, and given theories like Michael VanElzakker's, which postulate that a vagus nerve infection causes ME/CFS, it becomes less surprising perhaps that yoga may, in some subset of patients, have benefits. Yoga's ability to modulate the autonomic nervous system may be able to change to course of this disease for some.
• Thirdly, many yoga asanas (yoga poses) significantly exercise the spine (many yoga asanas rotationally twist and laterally bend the spine, thus giving a full workout for the spine), so one might speculate that this may facilitate
better blood flow into the spine, which may then help to clear any inflammation and viral infections in the dorsal root ganglia. Several ME/CFS patient post-mortems have found inflammation in the dorsal root ganglia of the spine.
• Fourthly, this spinal exercise may also promote the flow of
cerebrospinal fluid in the CNS, which may help clear out toxins from the brain. In this aspect, yoga might be similar to Perrin Twists, which are thought to clear toxins from the brain by promoting lymph fluid flow. Perrin's techniques have helped a few ME/CFS patients.
When my ME/CFS was at its worst though, I was far too weak physically to do more than one or two yoga asanas, so I can certainly appreciate that yoga will be impossible for many ME/CFS patients. However, that does not rule out the possibility that some patients may be able to do some yoga, and that out of those who can, some small subset might benefit from yoga.
Reading these stories about ME/CFS amelioration/recovery from yoga has made curious about trying it, because due I think to various medications I take, my ME/CFS has improved quite a bit over the last few years, so now I would be capable of doing some yoga.