Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Update

Hi, it's Dr. A. Wanted to do a quick highlight of one of the many newsletters that I have. You can find the link to this newsletter in the description box below, or you can just go to dranow.com, and you can go to the newsletter tab and find it there if you want to as well. This particular one is about chronic fatigue syndrome and and cell signaling. That sounds a little bit odd or what's that about sort of a thing. Well, that's why I wrote the newsletter. So what we do with these is I just sort of talk through the high points of the newsletter. If it's of interest to you, you can go and download the newsletter, look at the references, read through it, and get a whole lot more background than what I could ever speak in one of these things. That would also probably be a little bit boring, but One of the things about chronic fatigue syndrome is it's a multifactorial problem, and it is a diagnosis based on particular exclusion and inclusion criteria. Now, a number of years ago, about 60% of our practice was chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia patients. We had literally thousands and thousands of patient visits around chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and the diagnosis and treatment thereof. And one of the things that's very frustrating if you have chronic fatigue syndrome is you have this diagnosis that doesn't have like, you know, a cure and a single thing that you could do. And a lot of doctors, but also a lot of patients in that frustration, will search for, well, there must be, you know, a cause. And there is, but it's plural. There are causes. There's almost never one cause for chronic fatigue syndrome. Now, what goes on is, uh, if you look at research, research is often, you know, sometimes you get whole practice research, but research is usually, uh, trying to get Uh-huh. One question answered using the least number of various variables possible, which is how research is done. And so research would be looking, for instance, in this case at cell signaling and maybe, you know, people with chronic fatigue have some kind of unusual cell signaling that creates bad, you know, metabolic deficits and all this other stuff, which is true. But the real thing with chronic fatigue that we found over all those thousands of patient visits and years was you have to look at all of the things that determine our general health to look at why a chronically ill person is chronically ill. So you have to look at things like their hormonal balance, the endocrine system, You have to look at their digestion and absorption, and also their nutritional status. You have to look at their antioxidant status. You have to look at a lot of immunologic things. Do they have chronic infections? Do they have immunologic imbalances? We uncovered in a lot of our patients with chronic fatigue genetically predetermined immune deficiencies and other problems that they had, and then that leads to many other issues. Issues that go on. So there's lots and lots of places that you have to go looking. Well, this particular newsletter is about a paper that was very interesting written about cell signaling chronic fatigue, not that that's the only reason for chronic fatigue, but it was very novel and fairly new concept. So I thought it would make a really good newsletter. That's why I wrote it. So if you go into the newsletter, there's obviously a lot more description. There's the reference to the paper that I was looking at and some other things, and then just some commentary about it and what it could mean. Now, when you're thinking about this and cell signaling and things being out of balance, if you get below these bigger areas I mentioned like hormonal issues, chronic infections, toxicity, digestion absorption problems, etc., you get down to cell dysfunction, and cell dysfunction is at the base of most chronic illness, but It can come from a lot of different causes. Well, if you get all these causes pushing down on your cells and then your cells have an unusual way of cross-talking, they get more and more dysfunctional. Well, you are made up of cells, trillions of cells, and the more dysfunctional your cells are, the worse you feel and the sicker you tend to be. So this cell signaling idea is sort of one of these— maybe this is an answer to some of the pathology and signs and symptoms that we see in people with chronic fatigue. It's quite interesting. Now, rebalancing the cell signaling and trying to heal it up and all that gets into a lot of different areas, but some of the core areas that you can just kind of think about, and you can read about them in the newsletter if you desire, are number one, trying to restore the crosstalk Uh, on an inflammatory base. So inflammation throws off our cell communication and a lot of other things. It gets our immune system involved. We get chemistry that is aimed at trying to heal something, but it becomes inflammatory. Then we burn up some of our prerequisite systems. Antioxidants go down, inflammation goes up. And it's hard to kind of crawl out of that hole. So the precursor things that we want to be careful with there and try and restore include antioxidant balance. Antioxidant balance includes a base of 3 things, and then it works its way out from there, but the 3 things at the base are the function of vitamin E, vitamin C, and glutathione because they work together as a triplet between your fat and water-soluble components. But then other things that work are lipids that become important. So fats, a balance of the good fats, you think of omegas like omega-3 oils and you hear that they're good, that comes into it. Also phospholipids, which are a relative of the triglyceride family, but they're specifically made to put lipid tails into the cell membranes. And part of our communication with the cells, good or bad, is the health of the cell membrane. So phospholipid therapies are often used to try and upgrade because what happens is your lipids in your cell membrane, the sicker you are, the stiffer they get and the more damaged. And so if you get new ones coming through, you can actually improve the function by that. So lipids are sort of the next layer up above the redox things of vitamin C, E, and glutathione. Then there's a lot of other, what you might almost call biologic response modifying things. Now, we think of biologic response modification in rheumatology, cancer, and other things with certain drugs, but what I'm talking about are more global, a little bit more gentle hammer than some of those drugs. This would include things such as curcumin and boswellia, some of these botanical agents that you hear about, CBD, certain cannabinoids, and a number of other things as well. And the thing to consider with that is you, when it comes to cell signaling, trying to get back on track, you have to kind of do the macro That means eliminate as many hormonal balance problems, infectious immune problems, diet absorption, all of that problems, get the— kind of get the slate as clean as possible. That takes the stress off the system, but then usually the system's been so stressed for so long that the communication and crosstalk is all messed up, and that's getting down at the micro level and working on the redox with the vitamin Mm-hmm. Glutathione, working on the lipid status, and working on some of these biologic response modifying things. And it's not a quick fix, but it can be incredibly useful and helpful in chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and other chronic illnesses because they all share certain characteristics. They're different in certain ways, but they share certain characteristics. Well, if you're interested in that and you want to look at the reference and look at the more detail, you can get it in the newsletter. I'll put a link in the description box below, or you can always just go to dranow.com, go to the newsletter tab, you can find it there. It's CFS, like chronic fatigue syndrome, and cell signaling. And again, I really appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate the questions I get, so please like, share, subscribe, notifications, all that good stuff. Comment— always love the comments and questions— and I will see you on the next one.