I will try to clear up a few things now, but may have to make a second run since I can't respond to each question right now I'm too tired. CFS is definitely a complicated illness, and makes this kind of thing difficult to frame neatly, so my apologies. Since there is no diagnosis, I'm not really concerned here with Fibro/CFS/ME. We don't really know enough for it to be meaningful to separate them, at least not for the purposes here. And I'm sorry, but this forum says "CFS" in the title, so I don't think it's an ME forum is it? I'm personally not concerned with the name whatsoever, it's not what's important right now. IMO. A name is just a name. But that's for another thread...
You'll have to trust me about the researcher. Or not, it's up to you. Cort has spoken with him on the phone. I'm not asking for anything personal. Just the story about how you got sick if it was started by a physical trauma. I know there has been a lot of drama around this illness, so I understand the hesitation. But this is a simple, honest inquiry. I'll remove that part, I should have just asked the question and left him out of it...
The intent here wasn't to take a poll to figure out what caused your CFS. I don't think any of us really know. So maybe I should have left the other options off the poll, or just left the poll off all together. The intent was to figure out if anyone gets CFS directly after a severe physical trauma, with no other likely triggers/causes.
To further explain my question:
We are interested to know if CFS can be caused by physical trauma, and nothing else. So an example would be- car accident, hospitalized with trauma for days to weeks, followed by the onset of CFS (or just never fully recovering from the car accident, and the trauma turning into CFS)
So if you got CFS after a whole list of things, that would not count for this. If you got an infection after a trauma, that wouldn't count. Not because it's not valid, just because it's not clear what caused the CFS in that case.
This is just a feeler, nothing official. If a bunch of people wind up posting that this happened to them, or they know someone this happened to, it could trigger more inquiry into the idea and asking other sources. I thought I'd try to help by asking here. I'm probably in over my head since I also have CFS and am pretty drained. But it feels good to try to help.