Yes, but who would throw his arms up in resignation and sit back with popcorn
I am definitely not throwing my arms up in resignation.
There has not been a week in the last 12 years since I first developed ME/CFS from my virus that I have not been trying some pharmaceutical or supplement treatment. And not just individual medications, but often whole cocktails of meds aimed at a particular metabolic goal, or to follow a particular protocol used by the internationally renowned ME/CFS doctors (well known ME/CFS protocols like LDN, methylation protocol, immunomodulators like inosine and oxymatrine, antiviral drugs like Valtrex, Valcyte and Nexavir, etc).
But for the most part, these protocols only work for the lucky few. For most people, ME/CFS is an incurable disease. The percentage of people who recover is not high. Often they recover spontaneously after some years, other times they recover via a specific treatment. But recovery is not the norm.
If you have mild ME/CFS, then you may be able to work part time or perhaps full time, but you will not be able to do anything else (ie, when you come home, you just tend fall asleep exhausted). You won't have any social life after work.
If you have moderate ME/CFS, then you are not going to be able to work, and you wont be able to leave the house much, if at all. If you do leave the house, you will get hit with a nasty case of PEM (post-exertional malaise) the next day. PEM is one of the major limiting factors in ME/CFS. If you have severe ME/CFS, you won't even be able to leave your bed for most of the day, except for a few hours to eat and go to the bathroom.
I was getting worse and worse, and started to move into the severe ME/CFS category. However, after years of trial and error, a found a few treatments that work for me, and this improved my health so that now I am only moderate ME/CFS.
But my aim is to try to get to mild ME/CFS, as this would allow me to start working again. So I continue to try all sorts of treatments.
I have tried various immunomodulatory mushrooms, but they don't help. They are not really known to help ME/CFS. The immunomodulators that help ME/CFS tend to be those which shift the Th1/Th2 immune balance away from Th2 (ME/CFS patients tend to be stuck in Th2), and towards Th1 (which is the antiviral mode of the immune response, which is what you want to fight off viruses).
The latest medical treatment for ME/CFS is rituximab, an expensive drug ($50,000 for one year's treatment) which kills of all the B cells in your blood, which can then halt the autoimmune response (since B cells make autoantibodies). New ideas suggest ME/CFS may be an autoimmune disease. About one third of ME/CFS patients are being cured with rituximab, and another third get improvments, which is a major medical breakthrough. I am considering rituximab, but if it does not work, you will have wasted a lot of money.
Edited by Hip, 20 March 2017 - 11:37 PM.