Fighting those feelings of fatigue

[Ember]

By Marika Sboros, 30 May 2013

ARE you feeling TATT — tired all the time? It’s a common enough feeling, and could be simply because you’ve been working too hard, or just having too much fun. In that case, a good night’s sleep is usually all you need to make it go away.

When it lingers, and begins to interfere with your daily functioning at work and at play, it could signal something a little more sinister: a form of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

New approaches to diagnosis and treatment aim at making things a whole lot better for sufferers, because the syndrome continues to generate controversy in medical circles, with some doctors still believing it doesn’t exist.

Or if they are prepared to acknowledge its existence, they say it is "all in the mind". In other words, CFS is just a fancy word for malingering at worst, or at best, a form of psychosomatic illness. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, has promoted the idea that CFS is "hysteria" or hypochondria.

In medical terms, CFS is an umbrella term — or "dirt bin", as one medical specialist put it — for a range of different maladies that have included ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as Yuppie Flu), but also fibromyalgia and adrenal fatigue.

Even those who support the existence of conditions that fall under the term, have problems with calling any one of them a true CFS, because they say that helps to trivialise the condition.

Some experts say ME is a neurological disease and is recognised as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Thus it can’t be the same thing as CFS, which the WHO doesn’t recognise, and which "defines a heterogeneous patient group suffering from various conditions which involve the symptom of ‘fatigue’ ".

Certainly it’s true that a vast body of research studies has documented immunological, neurological and other physiological abnormalities, and simple fatigue is not necessarily the cardinal symptom. It points more towards what scientists have called "post-exertional exhaustion", a deep depletion of energy after even minimal exercise or activity.

Still, there are many specialists, among them Prof Obedy Mwantembe, a gastroenterologist and specialist physician at the Carstenhof Clinic in Midrand, who believe CFS is a perfectly good working umbrella term, and should be retained.....

More: http://www.bdlive.co.za/Feeds/BusinessDay/2013/05/30/fighting-those-feelings-of-fatigue

 

[Misfit Toy]

"His theory (untested) is that the gender divide is more to do with lifestyle stresses, and the amount of "organising and multi-tasking" women have to do compared with men."

I find this line most interesting because I came down with it when I was 18 and in college. I was doing the same things boys or men were doing; my homework, deciding whether I was going to eat a pizza or a hoagie (a delicious sandwich in a bun) or going to a party and having a "wine cooler." Some serious multi tasking, right?

This article annoys me. He's not saying we don't have it, but he's murky on the subject. People who are bed bound can't do CBT, more than likely and exercising...yeah, not sure about that one. Exercising can kill my fibromyalgia and I become super sleepy. If I walk, it can help my pain a little.