10. People usually get better from ME/CFS, it’s just a matter of time.

Answer: False

Most people with ME/CFS will have it for the course of their lifetime, despite using all available symptomatic treatments and complementary medicine.

Though the severity of the syndrome may vary extensively throughout one’s life, the rates of relapse following remission are relatively high. Children and adolescents have a higher rate of improvement to closer-to-normal function, though why this is so is not clear.

We may well find that ME/CFS is not one illness stemming from one cause, but a group of illnesses which result in similar clinical pictures.

The general consensus from research suggests patients have about a 6% chance of recovery – however, follow-up studies of rates of relapse are presumably unknown.  For those who remain sick, illness severity can be high and quality of life can be greatly diminished. Life span is shortened by at least 10 years. ME/CFS clinicians agree that early diagnosis is an important factor in how severe the ME/CFS becomes. Optimal management can at least prevent progression to housebound, dependant, and bedridden states.

Biomedical research is pointing to viral and environmental chemical damage to gene function…so we should not be surprised by the words of ME/CFS genetics researcher Jonathan Kerr, who notes that the specific treatment of virus infections could provide more benefit than is currently being given credit for:

“There is no specific treatment for CFS other than the much-underutilised approach of specific treatment of virus infections. Current priorities are to understand the molecular pathogenesis of disease in terms of human and virus gene expression, to develop a diagnostic test based on protein biomarkers, and to develop specific curative treatments.”