Money may not get you well, but the lack of it can keep you sick, or worse. Especially in the U.S., those who don't have any income have to hope they have somewhere to live, and someone to help them. Even if they get SSD, it's not enough to live on if you also have to pay for rent and assistance (or just rent and food... or just food and out-of-pocket medical expenses...). Supplements and alternative treatments which can help stabilize CFS - not even talking about improvement here - are therefore too expensive. And without someone to help you, how will you get to a doctor who will even believe CFS is 'real', and provide the necessary documentation to get any federal relief in the first place? (This ultimately also leaves you far more vulnerable to things like forced psychiatric hospitalization.)
If you don't have anyone to help you and nowhere to live, you're in trouble, especially if you didn't have time to plan for that situation. First of all, you need to be on Medicaid, which has an application process and it usually takes months to get approval. Disability housing is extremely difficult to get if you 'only' have a diagnosis of CFS. It takes time to apply, and you really need a social worker to help you. (Where will you find a free social worker? That's another question.) Even then, you have to be lucky to be accepted into any special 'assisted living' housing... and those tend to be fabulously expensive, so even if you had Medicaid they probably won't pay for it. (Also, assisted living is not for people who require lots of assistance; if you're anywhere close to bedridden, for example, forget it.) Without Medicaid and unless you can find some government program I don't currently know about, you're faced with homelessness. (A hospital social worker recently told me that they recently had to dump a very sick HIV patient out on the street - literally. This was given as an excuse for doing the same to me!)
If you have Medicaid you can get into the nursing home system, but it's not easy and you have to qualify under their criteria of 'disability'. I was 'lucky' that I caught a bunch of severe infections all at once, requiring hospitalization; that was enough to get me into the system. Once you're in, though, it is notoriously difficult to get out. The reason for this is that Medicaid takes all your social security income, which means you have no ability to save up for outside housing (eventually), and definitely not for out-of-pocket medical expenses, the internet, whatever.
The stress of illness is one thing; the additional stress of poverty is another, and is hard to describe for anyone who hasn't experienced it. It is a primal sort of stress, striking at the heart of the survival response; at its worst the stark reality of life-or-death is a constant, looming presence, especially when you are already extremely ill. This combined stress makes it pretty much impossible for one's CFS to even remain stable, let alone improve.
I have seen virtually no mention of these issues in any form on any website or in any CFS literature. The most I ever see mentioned is advice on how to get disability pay. No mention on how you can subsist on that, especially if you don't have anywhere to live or need assistance with the most basic daily tasks of living. For all the misfortune I've had, I'm still lucky; it could be much worse. I wonder how many people are in such situations. If Leonard Jason's studies are accurate, there are probably a great many PWC below the poverty level, most undiagnosed, and of those a good percentage would probably wind up homeless. A fair amount would ultimately die, I would guess.