Recognition and Acceptance -Part One
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (also known as ME, myalgic encephalomyelitis, and widely referred to as ME/CFS) can take over your life with an endless list of debilitating symptoms that reduce your quality of life and prevent you from living life to the fullest. Through these 3 blogs I am going to explain to you how I was personally affected by this debilitating illness and the journey and treatment you can get to allow you to recover and get your health and life back on track.
Life changing symptoms
As a previous sufferer of ME/CFS I can fully relate to what you are going through. I first started feeling the effect of this illness when I was in my early 20’s, I went from living an active life to suddenly being hit with overwhelming tiredness, sore throat, heavy limbs, sore back, neck, headaches and complete brain fog which left me forgetting names and faces and difficulty focusing. I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time which left me with this overwhelming feeling of despair – with a constant grating question running in my head – why me?
No matter what my family, friends, work colleagues or ill-informed health practitioners said I really could not work through it and trying to do that just made things worse. The list of physical, emotional, mental and even spiritual symptoms is practically endless. The symptoms turned up tailored and personalised to my specific weak points and hammed them up to the max as my strained nervous and immune system came crashing down on me. I found myself bottomed out of life, struggling to raise my head off the pillow and wishing this bad, crazy dream would come to a very swift end.
Acceptance
The real turning point for me was finally accepting that there really was something wrong with me and it was not going to just clear up or go away and sort itself out.
Thankfully help was at hand. Through the diligent and conscientious work of Dr Raymond Perrin, Osteopath and Researcher, he has identified the clinical signs of ME/CFS that are consistently present in those suffering from this isolating and debilitating condition.
He was responsible for lifting the veil of mystery on this often-misunderstood ailment and properly placing it not as a psychological condition, but as a dual crash of both the nervous and immune systems. He understood that this condition, which further research is increasingly showing, does have a physical component to it and as such – is responsive to hands on manual therapy.
Following this therapy, I am now fully recovered back to being me, living an active lifestyle that I so craved when I was ill. Nevertheless. it was through my personal experience that I decided to specialise in treating those with ME/CFS. If you are at this stage of acceptance and you feel ready to really address your symptoms, then with the holistic thinking that underpins Osteopathy we can understand and address how to get your life back on track.
The next blog in this series describes our approach and the treatment process you can expect.
