CFS/ME

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CFS/ME is a SPD related disorder, because both exhaustion and fatigue as the main symptoms can be traced back to neurological perception issues due to signal noise in the sensory nervous system. All CFS/ME symptoms are caused by external stimuli and they affect each different sensory system. This often causes similar symptoms, but which have each different causalities.

Fatigue:

  • Daylight exposure: Light is the body’s primary zeitgeber telling it what time it is so it can adjust to what is needed based on its genetic configuration. It’s based on the specific wave lenght of sunlight which differs during each phase of the day. As soon as light does not serve this function anymore for the body, circadian problem occur which usually come along with fatigue during the day. One problem in connection with CFS/ME can be light sensitivity, which leads to too little exposure with sun light. Patients avoid the sun and bright light on which the body loses its circadian rhythm over time leading to fatigue.
  • Body temperature: The core body temperature is the body’s main dial for the week and wake state. The higher the core body temperature is (within the normal range), the more awake we are; the lower it goes, the more drowsy we become. On of the main external influences on the core body temperature is the air we breath in. In healthy individuals, air is pre-heated and brought to optimal humidity in the nose, which needs adjustment depending on the air’s humidity and temperature. For patients with CFS/ME this adaption process doesn’t work due to the signal noise. The air remains too cool and with the wrong humidity leading to fatigue.
  • Signal noise: The signal noise in the sensory nervous system can be misinterpreted by the brain and other organs as fake information. This can also include fake information on the body’s core and surface temperatures and even vary for different areas of the body. This means that no matter what the real temperature is, the fake temperature information will lead to maladjustments by the body if the fake temperature from the signal noise is calibrated to a different temperature than the body’s natural temperature. In CFS/ME patients this fake temperature is likely too high and leading to fatigue, because the body keeps reducing the temperature.
  • Poor sleep: There a multiple aspects in CFS/ME which lead to poor sleep, like for instance a lack of stability in the sleep rhythm or the lack of physical fitness or weight problems due to exhausting too quickly. Prolonged phases with poor sleep lead to various mental and physiological problems and one of them is fatigue during the day.

Exhaustion:

  • Air Pressure: The breathing process requires a specific air pressure in the lungs. This air pressure is adapted with every breath to the oxygen content in the air, to the physiological demand of oxygen as well as to the air pressure on the outside. In healthy patients the adaption to the supply and demand of oxygen is an autonomous process, but in CFS/ME patients, the signal noise prevents an immediate adaption. This can lead to suffrocation symptoms similar to the altitude sickness with the typical symtoms of exhaustion CFS/ME patients experience. The exhaustion symptoms stop as soon as the air pressure stops changing or starts raising which leads to a higher oxygen intake.
  • Nutrition: Many CFS/ME patients have triggers for their exhaustion in certain foods and beverages. The common denominator for those triggers the respective ph-value during the digestive process. While in healthy individuals, the ph-value is adjusted autonomously, this only works to an insufficient degree in CFS/ME patients. For them, the ph-value remains acidic or alkiline until the food is fully procesed and leaves the body again. Additionally, there is the problem that food can only become relevant in regards to its ph-value late in the digestion process, or it can be that food combinations neutralize each others ph-value. This means exhaustion can come late and seemingly paradoxical, wich makes it hard to identify which foods are relevant for the exhaustion.
  • Exercise: Exhaustion from exercise is closely related to both, the air pressure and the nutrition problem. Air pressure is a problem, because the body doesn’t properly react to the higher oxygen demand from exercise, which leads to short-term exhaustion, whereas the nutrition problem is not because of intake, but because the inner-physiological processes don’t adapt to the changing milieu during the physical exercise. This leads then to ph-value imbalances, which sustain until the byproducts from the exercise are removed from the body without those mechanisms which require a information transmitted through the nervous system.

In general, there can be more stimuli and more effects leading to fatigue or exhaustion. The influence of each stimulus is also very individual, which has two reasons. For one, the signal noise is different in each person and also because many inner-physiological processes have redundancy, which mean that some of the imbalances are compensated without neurological regulation.