CFS/ME and The Gut

One of my first health problems after coming down with CFS/ME was my gut.  Food made me sick.  Very sick.  I would get nauseous no matter what I ate and my acupuncturist put me on double boiled white rice just so that I could eat something.  I rapidly dropped over 20lbs.  My gut slowly recovered and over the course of a month or so I could slowly add foods to my rice and eventually graduated to soups.  That was in 2010 but that was the start of my gut problems.

I damaged my gut decades ago.  Unbeknownst to me I had both osteoarthritis of the spine and fibro.  All I knew is that I was in great pain so I started taking the industrial strength ibuprofen I had been given for use after a surgery.  It very quickly wrecked my intestines.  About 15 years later I developed a wheat intolerance so my gut was pretty not okay even before the CFS/ME insult.  Then I contracted CFS/ME.  It wasn't until I did a Paleo Whole 30 and then a modified GAPS diet for a year after that that my gut finally started to heal.  Four years later and I can now tolerate wheat in small doses and am generally much better off than I've been in years.

However, my gut problem have come back to haunt me recently.  After four years straight on Celebrex for my headaches and joint pain, my gut finally rebelled and put in me in the hospital with gastritis, a painful inflammation of the gut lining.  So it is with some interest that i saw this recent study done on the gut microbiome of CFS/ME patients.  The only bit I don't agree with the authors on is that they jump to the conclusion that the differences they discovered in the gut and blood of PWME are the cause of CFS/ME symptoms.  That is a HUGE intellectual jump with not a lot of foundation under it.  Other than that the study has some interesting results.

Changes in Gut and Plasma Microbiome following Exercise Challenge in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)

• Sanjay K. Shukla ,
• Dane Cook,
• Jacob Meyer,
• Suzanne D. Vernon,
• Thao Le,
• Derek Clevidence,
• Charles E. Robertson,
• Steven J. Schrodi,
• Steven Yale,
• Daniel N. Frank

• Published: December 18, 2015
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145453