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High performers PR survey

geraldt52

Senior Member
Messages
602
It's easy to jump to erroneous conclusions within a self-selected cohort.

Women are more likely to seek medical care than men, educated professionals are more likely to seek medical care than those less educated, in the US less well off people can't even afford to seek medical care, type A people are more insistent than others when pursuing medical care, active people tend to be more in tune with their overall health than those less active....all these things lead to false conclusions about who suffers from ME/CFS...
 

Martin aka paused||M.E.

Senior Member
Messages
2,291
It's easy to jump to erroneous conclusions within a self-selected cohort.

Women are more likely to seek medical care than men, educated professionals are more likely to seek medical care than those less educated, in the US less well off people can't even afford to seek medical care, type A people are more insistent than others when pursuing medical care, active people tend to be more in tune with their overall health than those less active....all these things lead to false conclusions about who suffers from ME/CFS...
Good point
 

katabasis

Senior Member
Messages
153
I would definitely include myself in the 'high performers' category. Prior to ME/CFS, I worked as a pharmaceutical formulation chemist, a job which is both mentally demanding and also at times somewhat physically demanding (some days I'd spend 8 hours on my feet, in a lab setting). I did aerobic exercise usually 3-4 times a week, and I had a number of hobbies. I usually read at least one book per week, saw at least one concert per week, and I had just finished recording an album around the time the ME/CFS hit.

That said, I think my stress levels had been slowly but surely decreasing over the years. I had finally gotten a job doing something I rather liked, I had saved up a fair amount of money so there were fewer financial stresses. My relationships were healthy and continuing to strengthen. If there was one 'stressful' thing that happened prior to my ME/CFS, it was a business trip I took about a week before it hit, though in an absolute sense, it was still much less of a challenge than other work assignments I'd had in the past. Ultimately, I think the reason for my ME/CFS onset was more related to my ongoing gastrointestinal problems. It's possible stress had some kind of a cumulative effect on those, but I still think there must have been some more proximate cause for the ME/CFS that it would be more helpful to understand.

As @godlovesatrier and @geraldt52 point out, sampling bias likely plays a role in the appearance of 'high performing' people as an outsized subset of ME/CFS sufferers, since these are the people most likely to reach out to others about their health. But even if you did control for this sampling bias, I think that 'high performing' behavior itself still produces a kind of bias. ME/CFS symptoms, by definition, are exacerbated by physical or mental exertion, and people who have lifestyles which involve a lot of this exertion, and who are characteristically unwilling to compromise the continuity of their life achievements, are likely to ultimately worsen their ME/CFS, which ultimately makes them more likely to see formal representation in the statistics.

Even were there nothing fundamentally different in the pathophysiology of ME/CFS between 'high performers' and 'low performers', you would still see this distinction. It's still possible there is some role for the 'high performer' personality in the development of ME/CFS, but in practice it would be difficult to untangle its effect on the initial formation of the disease from its behavioral interaction with the continuing disease.
 

Rufous McKinney

Senior Member
Messages
13,251
It's easy to jump to erroneous conclusions within a self-selected cohort.

correct- very hard to do a survey without randomization...this group is not random

What always amazes me is the energy with which most of us lived most of our life before the illness.

None the less, your encounters do have some validity.

Academic degrees, workaholics, artists, people who were always above average seemed to me to be particularly susceptible to the disease.

So I am an extreme Type A minus athletic. I worked harder than most everyone else i ever worked with. More hours, more effort, and in my case, considerable success- and I paid the price. I worked for numerous years never taking my paid vacation. I wrote huge scientific reports on my days off and holidays. Who cares about cleaning?

An ME researcher in Australia, forgetting his name - in the psych group I think....serves up we are the one's who raised our hand in class, we rise up to answer the question. And this personality type makes us more vulnerable to the fall.

A coworker is writing her Xmas list, and I'm engaged in a training seminar, have 20 questions, raise my hand 9 times in 45 minutes. Most everyone else is asleep. They all hated it. I thought it was fascinating. My brain is different.

in charge of whatever needs somebody to be in charge of....thats me. No slacker here.

(and I was the chronically sick kid who had chronic eppstein barr the whole time all that happened).

I hiked for a living for 20 years, where trails do not exist... (doing ecology work, usually alone with cougars and bears).

now: this keep going is impossible.
 

Azayliah

Senior Member
Messages
156
Location
USA
I do not include myself in the list of high performers. I always wanted to be, and I certainly suffer from some OCD and perfectionist tendencies, but I was contending with lifelong insomnia and chronic illness (head colds until about age 14, pains and aches that started at about age 5 or 6 that I now know weren't normal), and then from about 13 I started having episodes of severe drowsiness and fatigued feelings in my arms and legs. I was just too tired to be a high performer.

But what I did do that I think many people do, and maybe especially high performers, is learn to ignore all the things that were wrong. "Everyone feels pain/tired, you just need to push through it!" Well, now I know that this is absolutely not true. The levels of pain and tiredness I was feeling were much higher than what the people telling me that were feeling, and I shouldn't have ignored it.
 
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Bergkamp

Senior Member
Messages
145
I was definitely an overachiever type.

Graduated with honours, during uni I always did part-time jobs, internships and student committees to boost my CV. Then got a job in finance in London, worked 60-100hr work weeks regularly. Still went to the gym 4-5x per week, put myself through tough & strict diets. Was making good money and was very fit, still wanted more. If I talked to a guy with an extremely successful career, I wanted to be him, and then if I talked in the gym to a guy who could bench 100kg I wanted to be him too. Then when I talked to someone who partied 4x per week I wanted that too. Never realised that the guy with the successful career never went to the gym and never went partying, and that the guy who benched 100kg did a part-time job and never went partying either. I wanted it all.

Still I don’t think this has played a significant role in me getting ME. I agree with the people on here who pointed towards selection bias. In today’s society and in this generation the majority is an overachiever type. Yet they don’t get ME
 

hapl808

Senior Member
Messages
2,053
If only we had a single event that gave millions of people ME/CFS in a short time period where we could then select and randomize cohorts to study diagnostics, susceptibility, treatments, etc? I mean, I realize that sounds like a pipe dream. And certainly if something like that happened, it would be cataclysmic for the ME/CFS community.

Or they'd just give it a different name and call it a fascinating novel illness and continue to ignore everyone who came before.
 

Strawberry

Senior Member
Messages
2,107
Location
Seattle, WA USA
There was a thread/ poll years ago about athletic people getting this. It was fairly high how many there were, but (as now) it really didn’t support everyone. I wonder what the percentage of healthy people would say they are athletic or high achievers. It could just be a normal slice of the population.

But yes, us highly active and type A get hit with this too.