The RECOVER Initiative – Not the Solution for Long COVID (Or Anyone Else)? The Lisa McCorkell Interview
The NIH's RECOVER Initiative is in a strange place. It's gone through most of its $1.15 billion nest egg without producing anything of note and its critics abound. It does have its supporters. Steven Deek at UCSF called RECOVER "a great success“, and other researchers...
Unraveled #4: Drs. Ruhoy and Kaufman on Sleep in ME/CFS, FM, long COVID and Allied Diseases
Sleep Series This is the 2nd in a series of (at least) 4 blogs on sleep. Pt. I - Bronc kicked the series off with an interview of Dr. Bruck - a retired sleep researcher whose son has ME/CFS. Pt. II - is an overview of a fascinating talk by two long-term ME/CFS/FM and...
Bad Motor? Are ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia and Long COVID all Motor Cortex Diseases?
Avindra Nath’s big ME/CFS NIH study recently found increased motor cortex excitability and issues with effort preference and “reward” in ME/CFS. Reward is kind of a weird but important term in neuroscience. The “reward system” is...
The Vampire: Is the Immune System Sucking the Energy Out of People with ME/CFS? – the NIH ME/CFS Conference Pt. I
Joesph Breen from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - which sponsored the conference - started the if off by referring to the last NIH ME/CFS conference - in 2019 - which was intended to accelerate...
Dan Neuffer on Recovery From ME/CFS and FM Pt. 4: “Stop Trying So Hard to Recover!”
"Stop Trying So Hard to Recover!" Dan Neuffer Dan Neuffer has been investigating ME/CFS and FM recovery stories longer than anyone. In our 3-part series of interviews so far, Dan has said that he's now seen so many recovery stories that he's stopped counting them,...
Roadmaps/Conferences/Advocacy Week/Webinars/Seminars Oh My…
Things are happening...so many things are happening (or have happened). In an effort to keep up with them - and not to miss some very timely events - I'm going to try and pack as many as I can find into one resource blog. Time-Sensitive Events Solve M.E.'s Advocacy...
Sleep Issues in People with ME – A Conversation with Professor Dorothy Bruck
(Thanks to Bronc for another guest post - this time focusing on the unrefreshing sleep that permeates this disease. In it, Bronc talks with a sleep researcher, Dr. Dorothy Bruck, whose son has ME. This is Pt. 1 of a 4-part series on sleep) Just before Xmas 2010, I...
The Nath Intramural ME/CFS Study Pt. II: Missed Opportunities, Misreadings and… Success (?)
The second part of a 3-part series of blogs on the “Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome” study looks at who was in the study and how they were selected, how severely the study was truncated by the pandemic (quite...
The Nath ME/CFS Intramural Study Pt. I: “It’s a Brain Disease…”
"One takeaway is It's a disease that comes from the brain" Nancy Klimas It was one of the most expensive ME/CFS studies ever done. The brainchild of former NIH Director Francis Collins, the unusual study was designed to give the NIH solid footing to move forward in a...