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| What Is CFS? |
| Feel tired? Can't seem to make it through the day without wearing out much less have time to enjoy the evening? If so, you are not alone. Fatigue seems epidemic in the Western world. Some say at the rate we are going, a quarter of the American population will develop some type of prolonged fatigue at some point in their lives. In a survey of almost a thousand patients visiting a primary care clinic, one-third complained of at least six months of fatigue severe enough to disrupt their lives. It turned out that many were diagnosed with the increasingly prevalent form of fatigue known as chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS. 1 |
| CFS first came into public awareness in 1985 when a mysterious epidemic struck a couple of hundred residents of a small town near Lake Tahoe. The debilitating illness they contracted lingered for so long that it became apparent that these folks suffered from far more than simple flu. Researchers suspect that CFS was around long before this, but that it went by different names. There have been disorders that sound strikingly similar to our modern chronic fatigue syndrome, such as the "hysteria" experienced by 19th century womena form of exhaustion accompanied by dizziness, headaches and mental confusion. The fatigue disorder "neurasthenia" hit |
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