I was hoping to get some feedback, positive or negative, on that last post. The silence I've heard, even with a number of people following my posts, tells me there was substantial non-comprehension. I'll make another attempt today.
What I've said previously is that you can't eliminate chaos from our bodies because weak chaos is a property of all robustly-stable systems in unpredictable environments. Healthy people exhibit weak chaos in such things as heart rate, regulation of blood pressure, gait, breathing, etc. In the largely uncharted territory of the dynamics of immune response, I predict that chaotic dynamics will turn up everywhere.
Popular accounts of chaotic dynamics tend to concentrate on a single feature: sensitive dependence on initial conditions. People also carry intellectual baggage with them into this field, thinking this is always bad.
In the technical literature on chaotic dynamics you will find everything discussed in terms of a phase space. This is a very powerful abstraction introduced in the 19th century. A single point in phase space of a purely deterministic system carries all the information needed to predict future behavior. Half the coordinates of a point in phase space are familiar ones like position in x,y or z; half are "momenta" telling you how rapidly those coordinates are changing at the moment. This means you can talk about that behavior as an "orbit" (trajectory) in phase space, which turns this into a kind of geometric problem involving the line traced by a moving point. (Poincare did this in trying to answer the question of stability of the Solar system. He couldn't say for sure that it was stable. We still can't.)
That sensitive dependence on initial conditions is only one aspect which causes a region of phase space to be labeled chaotic. Another requirement is that the region have a dense network of periodic "orbits". Predictable behavior is not entirely excluded, but it is very easy to switch from one kind of behavior to another. (Check for examples of
period-doubling. These don't have to be unusual. This happens in dripping faucets as the rate of flow increases, as I've tested. There are even
scientific papers on dripping faucets.) The third common requirement is called ergodicity, which I won't try to explain in detail. The central concept of this is that a chaotic trajectory ("orbit") in a region will pass close to every point in that region. From the standpoint of switching control from one behavior to another this is valuable, if problematic. The study of
how to control chaotic behavior even in machines is still in its infancy. Nature got there long before us.
Now if you take the conventional medical approach you will label everything like this "random", often forgetting that random essentially means "we don't know what will happen next". This will cause doctors to ignore what goes on in patients short of some clinical sign predicting imminent death, which calls for intervention, even if the odds are against success. The truth is that we don't understand what is happening in patients who are sick, but likely to fully recover. Recovery can take place in hours, days, weeks or months, and we have little basis on which to predict which patients will take which times. The possibility that there are previously-healthy patients who will remain sick for years, without dying and providing convenient specimens for pathologists, is resolutely rejected. These patients are anomalies to current medical theories (in the terminology of Thomas Kuhn) and are treated with the scorn typically reserved for anomalies you can't either predict or change. We talk about "healthcare" without having much of a clue about the causes of health in those who recover from short-term illness.
Those of us who remain in "recovery" states for years are subject to exaggerated forms of sensitivity to perturbations, and exhibit many kinds of changing responses, as our damaged bodies try to deal with an unsatisfactory situation. I am far from the first to note the similarity with problems seen in normal elderly people.
One typical predictor of cognitive decline in the elderly is repeated syncope (fainting). This is pretty clearly associated with control of blood pressure and hypoperfusion of parts of the brain. You can't expect to think very well if your brain isn't getting oxygen and glucose. There is no question such episodes are not good for the brain. Other organs can also be damaged by localized reductions in blood flow, though the results, except in the case of the heart, are less dramatic.
Another sign of dysregulation of blood flow is cold extremities. This doesn't typically affect us all the time, but many or most have episodic problems when we spend too much time upright. Doctors will pay attention if this reaches the point of causing loss of fingers or toes, but generally ignore every lesser problem because they are sure the patient's body will compensate, even if they have little idea how this works.
What I was suggesting in that previous post is that localized, episodic reduction in blood flow could tie together the problems in energy production, endocrine function and immune response. In the extreme case of stroke or other reperfusion injury a single episode can result in easily-detectable permanent damage. What happens in less severe cases of transient ischemias? The patients mostly recover without problems. How do they recover? That is a research question.
So, I'm saying "yes, chaos is involved in this disease" and "no, it is not unique to this illness". What I'm seeing is a defect in biological control of a number of important factors. I've concentrated on blood pressure and heart rate because these are easy to measure and understand. I could also talk about cortisol production or ADH. Lots of us have a lag in cortisol production which puts peak output well after the stimulus requiring it. Sum up production around a daily cycle, and we are usually normal. We can produce cortisol in response to demands, it just doesn't show up when needed, or doesn't stop when appropriate.
Likewise, with ADH (vasopressin), many of us are close to exhibiting polyuria because of inadequate ADH. This may even go so far as to result in diabetes insipidus. It appears there is a problem with regulation of total blood volume, but simply getting a test for such volume is outside of normal clinical practice. Regulation of electrolytes is also frequently disturbed. (In hot weather I take a "Salt Stick" capsule, along with fluids, before I go out. Most people don't have to be so careful.)
All of these things go beyond the simple "too much" or "too little" of standard clinical diagnostic tests. (It is as if your automobile mechanic only told you your car had an oil shortage which could be corrected by topping up the crankcase before each trip. Such an automobile needs repair, but I seriously doubt that mechanic should be the one to do it.)
Everywhere I look in this illness I see evidence of poorly regulated biological control systems. There is a great deal of interaction between these, as I've tried to argue about dynamics of blood flow. In a great many cases doctors can ignore dynamic behavior, secure in the knowledge the patient's body will somehow sort the problem out. This is not one of those cases. If you want to find a traditional cause, assuming there is such a single cause, you first need to see how these dynamics differ from health, and find what the abnormal behavior is responding to. If you wear blinders which prevent you seeing dynamics, you are not going to accomplish much.