Question: "The 5% that may be recovered... since there isn't a lot of testing done yet, could it be that those 5% don't even really have SEID, or CFIDS, or Iceland Disease or whatever you want to call it?"
Dr. Bell: "Yeah, but I don't think so."
Question: "You do think that 5% might actually recover?"
Dr. Bell: "Oh, yes.
Question: "Oh, really?"
Dr. Bell: "Yeah. That's something that I've looked at very intensely over the years... I wanted to know what did they do that was different - that caused them to recover. Did they exercise more, or less; did they take more vitamins, less vitamins; did they eat better?
"Now Lyndonville is a very small area, and I was the only physician in the area - so I kind of had a lock on these patients - and I was nice to them - I tried to be nice. And after looking at this, about half of the patients ate terribly. You know, they'd go to McDonald's every once in a while - and the other half ate meticulously - very good foods - and I didn't see any difference. Half of them had lots of vitamins, half of them did not... So I couldn't tell.
But what I was quite sure about was that they had the same illness. So, I had lots of ways of measuring the severity, measuring the complexity of the symptoms. For example, I was very intent on measuring the degree of lymph node tenderness. That's an unusual symptom - so that if you have rheumatoid arthritis, that's not one of the things that would happen.
So I'm quite sure they all had ME/CFS and there was a subset that clearly did get better."
Question: And you never had any inkling of what it was? [That caused them to recover]
Dr. Bell: Not an inkling - -
[See at 46:52 in the video. He had mentioned the 5% recovery rate earlier in the lecture as well.]