"Sickness behavior" are cool words. Asymmetries need correction not behaviors.
Although "sickness behavior" sounds like it might be some awful psychological interpretation of ME/CFS (and nearly everyone on this forum hates psychological theories of ME/CFS, and are always fighting for ME/CFS to be understood as the physiological condition is really is), sickness behavior is actually simply defined as the series of mental and physical symptoms you get when you come down with a bad infection like the flu. It is not some "psychobabble" concept.
Sickness behavior is considered to be an in-built adaptive response to dealing with an infection (eg: you are made to feel fatigue because you need to rest so that you can overcome the infection). Michael VanElzakker's theory is than in ME/CFS, the sickness response gets permanently turned on because of messages from the vagus, so that the fatigue etc is never ending.
I have a different explanation. The messages do scream out from every nerve constantly telling the brain that something is not right. The jaw is out of balance, the neck is out of balance In fact every structure around the skeleton is screaming out that it is asymmetric and cannot function properly.
I appreciate what you are saying about misaligned anatomy affecting bodily function, and clearly from the successes you have had in treating patients, your theory and method hold water.
However, ME/CFS symptoms are highly specific (ME/CFS is a lot more than just fatigue), so there needs to be an explanation of how these specific symptoms arise. The vagus nerve hypothesis provides such an explanation.
I have serious problems with the Canadian Consensus Document which was prepared in 2004. I registered serious reservations in a four page letter to them at the time.
What are your basic objections to the CCC? The Canadian Consensus Criteria are considered one of the best, far better than the notoriously bad Oxford Criteria, which are so vague and sloppy that they tend to select for depressed patients as well as ME/CFS patients. This means that when you do studies using the Oxford Criteria, your cohort has depressed patients in it as well as ME/CFS patients, so results from such studies cannot be relied on.
Having successfully treated very many patients over the years from a physical point of view leaves little room for accepting any vague hypotheses which make these illnesses into a medico-psycho-social phenomenon and confuses the patients by calling TMJ dysfunction a "co-morbidity".
As mentioned, almost everybody on this forum deplores psycho-social, psychogenic or psychosomatic theories of ME/CFS, so we are definitely in agreement there. Pretty much everyone here sees ME/CFS as a physical disease with a physical cause.
I am not sure why you are suggesting there is something is wrong with calling TMJ dysfunction a comorbidity of ME/CFS though. Is it perhaps because you view TMJ dysfunction as the causal basis of ME/CFS?
There are lots of comorbid conditions in ME/CFS, such as: irritable bowel syndrome, interstitial cystitis and overactive bladder (irritable bladder), chronic pelvic pain syndrome (prostatitis), endometriosis, Raynaud’s disease, multiple chemical sensitivity, temporomandibular joint disorder, myofascial pain syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, eating disorders, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, prolapsed mitral valve, Sjögren's syndrome (sicca syndrome), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), and neurally mediated hypotension.
