Chronic Illness Trauma Studies
How Adversity Shapes Health & Why It's Not In Your Head
Even though I'm a doctor myself, I felt anxiety when my primary care doctor retired and I had to find someone new. By that point I was 15 years into my illness, had consulted dozens of health care professionals in all kinds of specialties who were well respected in their fields but whose ways of ...
This is Harper’s chronic fatigue syndrome story, also known as CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis or "ME", ME/CFS, and CFIDS (chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome). I call her story a #Chrillog, which stands for “chronic illness weblogs,” in which we look at our journeys through a nervous ...
I don't really "want" to write about shame and other difficult emotions because it means having to feel into these feelings. And as many of you know, shame, in particular, can feel annihilating. But the origins of shame are sneaky and we tend to think it's because something is wrong with US. The ...
There are empowering, encouraging things about understanding the role of adversity and trauma as risk factors for chronic illness. Among the most important are that it provides opportunities. Opportunities for making sense of symptoms. Opportunities for removing blame. And opportunities for planting ...
Are you a WOMI (a woman with a mysterious illness)? Or a MOMI (a man with a mysterious illness)? A person of any orientation with an autoimmune disease? Or chronic fatigue syndrome (which research is beginning to suggest may also be an autoimmune illness)? Or who is not responding to treatment, or ...
In the few months before writing this article, I had an exacerbation of symptoms which I came to recognize as a trauma response. It had slowed me down to a crawl and to the point where I couldn’t even write a blog post. Here, I describe how symptoms can stem from trauma in a family system and ...
I've described how chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disease driven by a cell danger response (CDR) and a nervous system caught in a threat response of freeze and some of us with an underlying fight/flight response (wired and tired) in Part 1. This second post describes how the CDR gets stuck ...
This post contains a group of chronic fatigue syndrome questionnaires (ME/CFS surveys) and serves as a short companion to other, more detailed blog posts. Post I introduces Dr. Robert Naviaux' research on the cell danger response (CDR) and how ME/CFS represents a metabolic state of freeze. Post IIA ...
The cell danger response (CDR) is a hypothesis proposed by UC San Diego professor Robert Naviaux, MD, PhD, that offers a new paradigm for understanding disease. Research studies are proving this view to be a game changer - and a paradigm shifter. This research includes risk for chronic fatigue ...
