Yet another article saying that exercise can be detrimental to CFS patients, despite what the quacks and their lawyer believe. www.masmith.inspired.net.au/docs/stein2.htm#Orthostatic
"Most of us have grown up with these ideas [that exercise is good] and it is difficult to believe that for people with CFS/FM these ideas are untrue."
One of the quacks testified that even on days when I had to rest just getting to the kitchen and back, I should go out and exercise. Does he think I have more energy to exercise outdoors than indoors?! If I can't make it the 20 feet from the bed to the kitchen, then how does he expect me to walk a mile?
They just don't get it that some days, it's an act of utmost willpower just to get out of bed to feed the cats; there isn't enough willpower in the universe to walk a mile on days when it takes 15 minutes of trying just to sit up in bed, and when I finally accomplish that, put my feet over the edge to stand up and fall back onto the bed. My diaries indicate a lot of days when I walked a couple blocks to run an errand (mailbox or corner store) and returned exhausted. Sometimes, it cost me not only the rest of the day in bed, but several days in bed.
I trust my own experience, and what experts Dr. Cheney and Dr. Bell say about exercise, not what someone who's never even heard of Cheney thinks is the right treatment because it's the right treatment for other problems.
These quacks have got to learn to listen to the patient, to hear out her concerns, and to have the humility to admit that they do not know much about this cryptic disease and perhaps the patient would do better to go read up on it herself, rather than telling the patient to do something detrimental and then acting like she'd have recovered if she had done what they told her, despite it being contrary to the experts' advice and research. On several pieces of advice and prescriptions I got from these quacks, I was asked by other medical professionals "were they trying to kill you, or just get big bucks for an ER visit?"
The new Cheney interview, http://www.virtualhometown.com/dfwcfids/medical/cheney/heart04.htm , suggests cardiac involvement. I complained of chronic dizziness and fainting -- cardiac symptoms -- and mydiaries list other symptoms, all of which were brushed aside or attributed to "anxiety" rather than a physical cause. I'm going to get the last laugh if getting the test mentioned in the article proves that I have serious cardiac problems, and heart damage that possibly could have been avoided if someone had tested for it sooner. Then we'll see how much a jury awards me for losing 30 years of my work life because these quacks wanted to treat me for depression (which the psychiatrists say I don't have), thyroid (which the blood test says I don't have), and laziness (which my former co-workers will say I don't have), while ignoring the documented "severe sleep disturbance".