The good news coming out of last week's IACFS conference is that a professor at Stanford has had promising results giving patients anti-viral medication. Which proves, unequivocally, that the problem is a virus and not something that can be fixed with an anti-depressant.
The other good news is that this medication is significantly less expensive than Ampligen, which costs $20,000 a year (... if you can get it, because it's not yet FDA approved). This one is already FDA approved.
The bad news is that the medication costs over $1000 a month, and he starts with a six-month trial. That means that anyone who is so sick that they are surviving on Disability benefits would have to pay every cent of their income (and then some) for the medication, meaning that only those who are independently wealthy or who have an employed spouse with dependant health coverage can benefit from this new treatment.
Since something like 3/4 of marriages affected by chronic illness break up, and those of us who had a nest egg before we got sick have long since spent it trying to stay alive for years until we were finally approved for Disability benefits, you can figure out for yourself what a very small number of the million American CFS patients will actually be able to afford the pills.
Without a job, you can't get a second mortgage (assuming you still own a house, or that you have any equity left after years of living off it while waiting for your benefits). No one is going to loan a disabled person money on the promise that you'll be back to work in 6 months -- they've heard that snake-oil-fueled promise too many times before. If you don't have that spare $12,000 a year in cash to pay for the anti-viral pills, you may as well resign yourself to the fact that you are going to remain too sick to work even though a treatment has been found.
As for me, I found a dollar and bought a Lotto ticket for this week. Wish me luck!
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