Blowing a Fuse

CFS and Fibromyalgia — When You "Blow a Fuse"

As we noted previously, CFS and fibromyalgia are not a single illness. Our study has shown that it is a mix of many different processes that can be triggered by many causes. Some of you had your illness caused by any of a number of infections. In this situation, you can often give the time that your illness began almost to the day. This is also the case in those of you who had an injury (sometimes very mild) that was enough to disrupt your sleep and trigger this process. In others the illness had a more gradual onset. This may have been associated with hormonal deficiencies (e.g., low thyroid, estrogen, testosterone, cortisone, etc.) despite normal blood tests. In others, it may be associated with chronic stress, antibiotic use with secondary yeast overgrowth, and/or nutritional deficiencies. Indeed, we have found well over 100 common causes of, and factors that contribute to, these syndromes.

What these processes have in common is that the energy crisis can suppress a major control center in your brain called the hypothalamus. This small area uses a lot of energy, and therefore goes off line first during an energy crisis. It is like blowing a fuse or tripping a circuit breaker. This center controls sleep, your hormonal system, temperature, and blood flow/blood pressure/sweating. When muscles don’t have enough energy, they get locked in the shortened position (think writer’s cramp or rigor mortis) and you’ll be in pain. When one realizes this, the myriad symptoms seen in CFS/fibromyalgia suddenly made sense. It also gave us a way to effectively treat these illnesses, while also learning how to optimize energy production to treat pain and mild to moderate fatigue. The bottom line? Optimizing energy to feel great can have many other fringe benefits!