The danger of pushing through
Q&A on ME/CFS Research with Dr. Ron Davis
Q. If this process is a protective mechanism, could it be a bad thing to turn it off?
Ron Davis: I don’t think so. I don’t think it would be bad to turn it off. I think that would be the natural course. It’s designed to come on to protect the individual, and it should in fact reset and go back on; that should be the natural pathway. Something is happening that prevents that from happening, and that is also something we should be trying to explore.
This is a hypothesis that I have: We have been trained socially to push through things. You certainly see a lot of athletes that have this disease that were extremely active. They’ve learned to push through when they get tired. It’s possible that this mentality of pushing through, which causes crashes, is what keeps people in this… and naturally would change, and they would be reset, and go back to normal.
We’ve certainly seen cases like a viral infection where people are quite sick for some time and then they recover. It’s possible that’s the normal mechanism, and they’ve rested, and they’ve recovered. That it’s because they tried to push through the illness, and too early, and that’s what caused them to continue to have the disease. In other words, the crashing actually reinitiates the disease over and over again, and that’s what keeps them in it for years and years.
Watch the whole video here:
Q&A on ME/CFS Research with Dr. Ron Davis
