MD with ME

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 thr...

Dr. Paul Cheney is one of the major players in the ME world. He was an internal medicine doctor in Incline Village when the CFS outbreak occurred there nearly 30 years ago and has been studying the complicated and perplexing disease ever since. Recently (April 2013) Dr. Cheney presented at a conference and his power point slides and audio were recorded and uploaded to youtube. You can see his entire presentation including a question and answer session at the bottom of this post. The presentation itself is quite lengthy - nearly 2 hours, and the Q&A is about 30 minutes. A summary of the key points (as I see them) is posted below if you do not have the energy or time to listen to the entire recording. If you have questions like, "what do you think he meant when he said...?" ask in the comments section and I will see if I can figure it out. A summary will follow each video. Major important points for all 3 videos in my opinion are here: ME patients have a ce...