MD with ME

If you have not already seen Dr. Bateman's video regarding her thoughts on the IACFSME conference and her unified theory this video is worth watching. Whoever created the video really messed up the slides... they are only on the correct slides for about the first half, so just listening is best for the 2nd half. She is absolutely correct that pretty much all doctors are seeing at most a few puzzle pieces of this disease and do not have the big picture. This is mostly due to the fact that ME is far more complex than any disease we have ever studied before, but also because medicine is a highly sub-specialized field (medical research is even worse). I hope that she and others will pursue validating this theory. Personally, I think it is a very good theory and hope more research is done on CNS autoimmunity and inflammation, but my own "unified theory" is a bit different. Perhaps more on that later...

Until the last post on VIP , I have not posted anything here for a long time. I apologize for that, but my health has been so poor it is very difficult to work on blog posts, even for short periods of time. That being said, I would like to post more material here, but will probably need to keep the posts pretty short. Most of my ideas are things that are pretty involved or complicated and would therefore take a lot of time for me to do. If any of you have suggestions of things that you would be interested in reading about from my perspective as a doctor with disabling ME, please let me know in the comments sections below. Thank you!

This is a post about a medication that very few people have tried. I thought I would share my experience so far. As always, if you have questions or anything to say regarding VIP I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What is VIP? Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) is something that is produced by the body that has a broad range of actions that could potentially benefit ME patients. It does all kinds of things, effecting the GI, cardiovascular, CNS, endocrine, and immune systems at least. I am not going to go into great detail regarding its actions at this point because its so complicated. Let me go ahead and say that no one would expect this to be a cure - its purpose would be to provide symptomatic relief. VIP was recently touted as a successful treatment for CIRS-WDB patients in a paper by Dr. Shoemaker, a mold expert, in a small group of 20 patients.  There are some problems with his paper in my opinion. For example, the fact that he tells us there were three t