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Most sufferers report an excellent recovery on my protocol but they often stop short of 100% recovery.

I have been searching for the missing link which leaves some patients short of a full recovery and I feel that we are very close.

New research indicates that 'true' CFS/ Fibromyalgia patients in the third stage of the disease are maintained in a disabled state by mitochondrial dysfunction resulting in secondary heart failure.

As part of your test panel during Stage 1, you should have all been for an ECG which likely came back completely normal.

The reason for this is that standard existing ECG methods do not show the type of heart failure that you are experiencing.

Technology has only developed enough to detect these new anomalies in the last few years.

Existing ECG technology only shows that your heart is pumping correctly, i.e. the systolic cardiac output is good.

The heart failure found in CFS/ Fibromyalgia sufferers is a form of diastolic cardiac dysfunction caused by mitochondrial failure.

If you imagine the heart as a bicycle pump and the blood as air, the diastolic phase would be the pump filling with air as the tube is pulled back and the systolic phase would be the pushing of the tube in, pushing air into the tyre.

Your hearts left ventricle is not filling up correctly with blood due to failure of the most important energy producing organelles in the heart, the mitochondria. Tiny messengers that allow all cells in the body to produce the energy they require for their specific purpose.

This means that although the heart pump is pushing the blood that it has in the left ventricle out quite nicely, there is simply less of it due to the faulty diastolic phase of the cycle.

As I have spoken at great length in the past, the human body is an astonishing organism in the way it reacts to correct anomalies, disabilities and imperfections, and this appears once again, and quite remarkably, to be what is happening in CFS/ Fibromyalgia.

In response to the reduced blood flow, the brain reacts immediately to tell the various organ systems that there is not enough blood to go round and begins to shut down various organs in a routine and specific order of what it considers their importance to the overall survival of the organism.

The reason existing therapies appears to stop short of 100% recovery for some patients is because although the toxic stress is being removed and lymphatic function is restored, the mitochondria appear to have been switched off by the disease process.

The heart is left to make a partial recovery on its own, which it fails to do because it has lost the ability to make the essential ingredients needed for its own recovery, energy.

We now have the ability to take direct intervention to improve the hearts function by improving the function of the mitochondrial organelles that are preventing the heart cells themselves from doing their job.

Mitochondria represent essential elements of energy production within the heart cells, which are themselves essential for diastolic (filling phase) function of the left ventricle.

So what is the process by which we have reached a state of full blown CFS/ Fibromyalgia?

Let's examine the sequence of events more closely.

The Virus/ Bacteria/ VOC/ Pesticide/ Mycoplasma, whatever the insult, whatever the trigger infection for your illness is now irrelevant; What is relevant is that it has exploited a weakened state in the central lymphatic duct (the thoracic duct) and damaged the Sympathetic Nervous System.

In a normal otherwise healthy patient with, for example, latent Epstein Barr originating from the gut, the lymphatic and immune system will react to eradicate the infection and enable a full recovery within 3 to 12 weeks.

In potential CFS/ Fibromyalgia hosts, this process fails due to the lymphatic weakness/ stress in the thoracic duct and the infectious agent is allowed to affect the Autonomic Nervous System.

With VOC's, pesticides, chemical agents etc, the toxins appear to attach themselves directly to key host cells and target DNA; in so doing they cause an extreme immune reaction.

This time you experienced an altered, dysfunctional immune and lymphatic reaction in response to the trigger infection/ exposure.

As you sat around assuming a recovery was near, at the beginning of the illness, your body was in fact spiralling down through its inability to detoxify due to the failed lymphatics and faulty immune reaction as determined by the damaged ANS.

You were entering a new extreme phase of toxic stress/strain/shock (as quantifiably measurable by cell free DNA). You may recall how appalling you felt at onset.

As time went on and you were still unaware of your impending condition, more and more toxins were building up in your system gradually attaching themselves to your DNA and genes, so beginning a vicious CFS spiral progressing towards the huge variety of effects seen across multiple organ systems.

In some cases toxins attaching to DNA will prevent the cell from functioning at all, in others for example genes they will alter the expression of the gene resulting in abreaction to stimuli, for example the differing effects we see on white blood cells, hormone production, and muscle contraction, brain function, intolerance of light, sound etc.

Every cell in the body is affected explaining the vast array of disconnected symptoms that we see in CFS/ Fibromyalgia sufferers.

As doctors and scientists scrabble around trying to find out what is happening, their Western medical training defines that they take each symptom individually, attempting to analyse cause and effect for each failing system.

They treat one symptom only to see a side effect somewhere else as drugs are poorly tolerated by these patients, and then they see a new symptom somewhere else and so on and so forth.

At this point in exasperation at their failure a health provider will attempt to shift the problem somewhere else, often using CBT as it is the least expensive option and simultaneously shifts the blame and related coping mechanisms such as pacing, directly onto the patient and their carers.

CBT uses techniques from positive thinking, neuro linguistic programming and hypnosis to fool the patient into not feeling so bad about the fact that they are seriously ill but the doctors aren't prepared/ or are unable to help. It's called reframing.

The patient stops approaching healthcare providers for assistance and the provider wrongly records a successful outcome.

It can be seen why such an enormous number of diagnoses and prognoses have developed for the fatigue spectrum illnesses.

The answer is of course to take a holistic approach and intervene at the root cause of all the organ failures.

Meanwhile back at the ranch.

The existence of increasing toxic stress causes massive oxidative damage with extremely high associated cell free DNA, resulting in rapid mitochondrial dysfunction via a failure of proton pumping.

Mitochondrial failure as a result of oxidative stress is a commonly recognised symptom of neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Mitochondrial enzymes are extremely sensitive to oxidative stress upon a cell.

Once disrupted mitochondria will produce reactive oxygen species which starts yet another vicious cycle of cellular damage inside the mitochondrial organelle.

So it can be seen that the final insult in this process of toxic stress is mitochondrial failure.

Failure of the very cells needed to produce energy, Adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP), which every other cell in the body requires for its own specific function.

At this point you are officially Stage 3 CFS/ Fibromyalgia/ ME.

You will have stopped doing most non-essential activities such as sport and social activities. Alcohol, smoking, junk food will be quickly eradicated as a Stage 3 cannot tolerate them.

If you are high functioning with a sedentary job you may still be able to work if you have understanding colleagues, but two thirds of CFS/ Fibromyalgia sufferers end up unemployed or only working part time.

The illness forces these changes upon you. You will most likely have been an active, healthy, lively person pre-illness.

So this is where you are at, the damage is done, you are not particularly adding to the damage as the body has reached a morbid state of coexistence/ symbiosis with the damaged mitochondria in order to protect the organism from full blown heart failure.

And there you remain until intervention.

In my next article I talk more about the downward spiral and then most importantly, intervention and the road to recovery.