Dr. Diane Mueller addresses the common question of whether chronic fatigue (including chronic fatigue syndrome) is permanent. She challenges the notion that the condition is 'all in the mind' and emphasizes that identifying and treating root causes often leads to reversal of fatigue—observing improvement in many patients (she estimates ~95% in practice). She urges patients to advocate for additional diagnostic testing beyond basic labs and promotes her clinic and an upcoming masterclass.
Chapters
Hey, Dr. Diane, your chronic illness expert talking about chronic fatigue today and a question that I get all of the time, which is, will I always have it? And unfortunately, so many people that get the chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis are basically told that it's either in their mind or there's no reason for it and that they just have to manage. This is really unfortunate. This is really unfortunate because it's not true. And what I see in my practice all the time is that when we get to the root causes, we actually see chronic fatigue reverse, where we see energy come up. And I have so many stories of people saying things like, wow, I could barely even make it to the grocery store or something that oftentimes I'll find people say to me is when they have chronic fatigue, that on every day they would have to choose between tiny little tasks. Will I do the dishes or will I do the laundry, where I go shopping today for my groceries or will I clean the refrigerator, whatever. And there are these tiny little tasks. And a lot of times people can only do one of those tasks and they're choosing every day like what is the most important 20 minute task so they can do something to survive because the chronic fatigue so bad. And what I see over and over is when we get to the reasons, and I know you've been told, many of you been told there's not a reason for it, but there's reasons the body gets fatigued. The body just does not get fatigued for no reason. Oftentimes we're told that when the basic labs are normal and there's not a known reason yet. Right? So you have to do additional diagnostic testing that is just outside of the lens and the scope of what a lot of doctors are trained to do do. So watch my earlier video on what are the possible root causes and subscribe to the channel to get more this month on chronic fatigue. But the idea is, no, you don't have to live with this forever. So much of the time, I would say 95% of the time, what I see is when we get to the root, we can actually reverse this. And I see people from moving, from having to make these choices of what am I going to do today to survive, which my top task, because I can only do one tiny, tiny, tiny little thing, to running, to working out, to doing a full life with a lot of activities. And I just see people return to health over and over and over again. So be an advocate for yourself. If we can help you. At my clinic, there's information in the show. Notes, please join me for my next masterclass on fatigue, which is coming up here this month. And you can register for that by looking in the show notes. And that's it for now. So I will see you on another video. It.
