[Llamamoe]

What you're looking at is people with really bad gut microbiomes or other ongoing infections, not "CSS" - the behavior you're describing is called sickness behavior[1] and is produced by ongoing infections and blood infiltration by bacterial toxins like LPS (which coincidentally is used to induce mouse models of depression)

Rhetoric like yours is why most chronically ill people suffer for years and decades before getting any kind of diagnosis or treatment at all.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8960409/?report...

[lindsaywaterman]

Well - I myself had cfs and found that pacing and mindfulness really helped! I think these approaches have been empowering for both myself and hundreds of my patients. And there is some clinical research there to back my opinions up. however I am always open to and hopeful that other approaches like those that go via the microbiome, will be helpful.

[Llamamoe]

I believe you, but at the same time you have to take the correction for the fact that humans are storytelling creatures- we correlate our life experiences with our internal experience and spin them into stories by instinct- I've never met anyone who wasn't convinced their illness was related to life events and mindset for a long while before stumbling onto a diagnosis.

So I always wonder, are we seeing successful treatment of somatic complaints, or are we seeing regression to the mean spun into a story, or perhaps both?

[lindsaywaterman]

Reasonable question! I ask myself the same. Always good to open to other points of view!