Occasionally I think the medical world has a communication problem.
In 1989 I had some blood work done which checked for Epstein-Barr (it wasn't present) for reasons that made sense at the time. Then I got ME/CFS a few weeks later, and blood work showed
that it was present this time.
That's not a slam-dunk for Epstein-Barr as a cause, of course, but I thought it was interesting enough to have the data that I talked to my immunologist about cowriting a paper on it.
She demurred, saying that quite a few such papers (where patients by chance had had before-and-after tests) had been published and there wasn't any value in adding another one, since it was pretty common to see the same pattern of Epstein-Barr virus not being there beforehand, and then appearing after in blood work after the onset of symptoms.
Fast forward to 2023 and now there's a paper saying that ME/CFS might have a post-viral infection origin.
People have been saying this about post-viral sequelae and EBV and CFS for a long time, but the evidence is just not there.
EBV is incredibly common, it is not surprising that many who have had ME/CFS would have it.
The medical world does not know how to communicate about problems that are likely coproductive of psychological and physical causes, especially in a post-AIDS patient advocacy world, simply because patients do not like hearing that there is anything psychological involved at all.
It's looking like <some stressful assault on the body's immune system> is a necessary but not sufficient condition to developing CFS. Further, there are many events which can serve as triggers.
But in the cases where the other prerequisite conditions are met, EBV is usually the causal trigger.
In 1989 I had some blood work done which checked for Epstein-Barr (it wasn't present) for reasons that made sense at the time. Then I got ME/CFS a few weeks later, and blood work showed that it was present this time.
That's not a slam-dunk for Epstein-Barr as a cause, of course, but I thought it was interesting enough to have the data that I talked to my immunologist about cowriting a paper on it.
She demurred, saying that quite a few such papers (where patients by chance had had before-and-after tests) had been published and there wasn't any value in adding another one, since it was pretty common to see the same pattern of Epstein-Barr virus not being there beforehand, and then appearing after in blood work after the onset of symptoms.
Fast forward to 2023 and now there's a paper saying that ME/CFS might have a post-viral infection origin.