@Not dead yet! This idea makes sense to me. There is research into proviruses in our DNA. I read that proviruses may make up as much as 8% of our DNA - inherited endogenous retroviruses. Crazy.
I was advised by one expert to spend a week at Pine Ridge Reservation, but the great Medicine men may have all passed? Black Elk, Moves Camp, others. Terrible what happened to our Native Americans - the intentional destruction of ancient knowledge and sacred objects.
There is a QiGong Grandmaster in South El Monte, California, known as the Jewel of China, The Healer's Healer, Grandmaster Zhou. I saw him several years ago for a QiGong massage and asked him ( thru an interpreter) why had I been sick so long and why can't I get well.
He said, with a smile, "You are a kind and generous person and you gave away your energy." What can I do to get better and stay well?
The response was, " Try to breathe."
(LONG post, skip to the bottom, below the link if you just want to read about CFS)
There definitely is a lot more to illness than just chemicals, experiments, and analysis. I started having migraines around age 24, and at one point I went back to college to learn more math/ computer science. I had been a B/C student when I got my degree a few years before. But this time I got straight A's. And I was at a university, not a college that time, so it was harder, not easier. As awful as the pain of migraine is, I do credit it for my jump in intelligence. Just before and just after a migraine I'd have these amazing insights.
During, I'd often end up in the ER, until I had drugs to stop it. But when it was controlled I missed the insights. I understand perfectly why the guy int he Math movie (Beautiful Mind) refused to take his drugs. It was probably better for him to deal with the visions and not lose the math. If I went back to college now again, I'd probably drop the migraine meds too. I'd rather nearly die for two days and have the insight. But how do I explain that to a doctor? It's a square peg / round hole problem. (Do not try this at home kids, migraine is not a nootropic!
At Pine Ridge the medicine men were probably in hiding. Especially there, they have this "no teaching whites" rule. I'm surprised anyone told you to go there, I mean except to offer social services like training classes or something. The Hopi and the Oglala Lakota (and others) have an insularity that I completely understand. One of the few things they have left is their language and faith. I wouldn't ask to share it, though human curiosity would make me accept if it was offered.
Sometimes I want to go to a local reservation and offer to learn the language. But what good would it do for the language to only survive in those without the blood? I suppose I could learn it, and then wait for the kids to get older and start caring again (everyone gets sentimental when they turn 40ish), and THEN teach it back to them. It would be about the only thing that we could do now that would be truly helpful, be a link between the old and the new.
Several medicine men have shared the knowledge before (Sun Bear is a prominent example), there are books. Largely condemned by the current members. But there is also plenty of shamanism from Europe. It's just been brutally stamped out during the Middle Ages. There's a "neopagan" movement in every country in Europe, looking for the clues to what they believed. Trouble is, the map is changed now. There is no "Spanish" shamanism, for that you have to go back and see the regions that eventually joined together to become Spain. Seek the culture of each people, find the one that resonates with you. It's a difficult task.
Some people also take it literally that Montezuma told Cortes that they were founded by people from the East and that they knew he was coming because their founder told them eventually more people would come from the East. There were so many empires back then, and so expansionist, that it makes sense they would travel as far as they could. Which one, I couldn't say. But the ziggurat structures have been commented upon before. So for some people, it might not be necessary to go to war-torn Israel to seek Inanna, for example.
Yeah the way anything goes, the winners claim the losers are "brutal savages" and that they are "saving them from squalor and misery." You hear that description for anyone who was ultimately defeated. We just can't believe that writing, world commerce, modern ideas and technology existed way back then, partly because we wiped those "stupid" people out. But look at a place like Baalbek in Lebanon (youtube is good for the visuals). Nobody can tell me those people didn't have technology - tech that we do not have yet. I believe we are the backward dumb ones. A period of expansionist destruction killed not only them, but the people who knew how to do those wonders.
I had one of those moments when I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry when I read about Cortes and the "discovery" of Mexico. The priests would try to learn the language of the natives and teach them Spanish, then the Bishops would come along and destroy all their native writings , burning their code of laws and any other writings. They made it illegal for them to write and all writing materials were confiscated. Then they go back to Spain and tell the monarchs, "they're illiterate savages."
To their credit some of the minor priests disagreed with the whole Inquisition thing, so they helped hide what they could and sent the old people deep in the jungles. They kept careful journals of happenings, which would be buried in the most remote parts of libraries, never to be read again (until modern archaeology found some). The Spanish couldn't tolerate that another civilization could be valuable back then. It was the height of the Inquisition, unbelievably bad timing.
Good read on that:
http://www.alibris.com/Mysteries-of-the-Mexican-Pyramids-Peter-Tompkins/book/4545573
So back to CFS, I'm very philosophical about viruses, even retroviruses, because ultimately they are the messengers of first contact between civilizations. To see this principle in action, go from any "Western" country to India, and stay at least a month. I guarantee you will "come down with something." India is legendary for that. In Mexico it's called "Montezuma's Revenge." Germs are nature's handshake.
There are billions of microbes in a modern ocean beach. The real test is to see if you can survive going there and bathing. In the end, we're going to conquer the illness with immunity, not with pacifying drugs that only prolong the dysfunction. How long it takes to get there depends on how much the balance of greed/health tips in either direction.
Personally I wish our civilization could go back to learning to build gigantic monuments. It would be lots more fun than figuring out the best way to scam people into buying yet another palliative drug, and everyone wondering why they're on 10 drugs by age 40. I don't consider that "enlightenment" but maybe the Ferengi would (star trek reference).
If you're looking for a shamanic healing modality that I think is vastly overlooked, Tibetan singing bowl therapy is a good choice, and they aren't too secretive about it. Actually throughout central Asia, you can visit a shaman and he/she will do what s/he can for you for a price. For some reason that doesn't bother me, but I know how it looks to a modern institution like the FDA. Oh well that's their problem. And if they got off their duff more often and helped us ME/CFS patients out, I wouldn't need to be philosophical
