Chronic Illness Trauma Studies
How Adversity Shapes Health & Why It's Not In Your Head
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 ...
This post, also a guest post on Cort Johnson's Health Rising blog about chronic fatigue syndrome (aka ME/CFS), introduces the relationship between ME/CFS and freeze states. These occur in the nervous system, in our cells and in all kinds of tissues in the body (updated October 2020). The science ...
Understanding the connections between trauma and ME/CFS (myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) has helped me begin to heal and change the direction of my life in the best possible ways. I never realized that I'd experienced adversity until I left medical practice, retrained as a trauma ...
My paternal grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I discovered some secrets about his life when I looked into his story because there are links between multigenerational trauma and chronic illness. This is because trauma that occurs in our parents' or grandparents' lives or in their family's ...
