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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2019, @03:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the telling-the-truth dept.

Chronic fatigue syndrome affects some, is ignored in those who have anything-at-all wrong, might be accepted with a shrug and a pat on the back for the otherwise healthy, and is otherwise unknown. Until now, no one has had anything to go on — but now, there's a way to show that seemingly healthy people are, in fact, affected by something. Well, it's a start.

Using a test to judge the stress of the immune system, researchers at Stanford have now identified those symptomatically diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome as having a condition that is not identified in a control group. While this is very little to go on, it is more than nothing to go on, and so could start a search for a treatment for an otherwise clueless grab at nothing. The simple fact that there is now a distinction is itself news, but also that the research uses a lab-on-a-chip to assess change in current of a sample of immune cells, giving them an indicator of the health (or stress) of the sample is an example of a technology that hasn't been considered until the last few years — and a hint at advances offered by even simple, routine advances of technology.

As a shameless plug, I consulted a trusted holistic health friend (note: whole-health/holistic, not homeopathic/pretend) about CFS, and she mentioned that she feels it's a general toxicity problem. The immune system does play a role in clearing various toxins from the body, so perhaps another clue for researchers to pursue. (Tip: up until 1990, lead-based solder was used in household plumbing. How much that matters, perhaps not a whole lot.)


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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:33PM (6 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:33PM (#840330) Journal

    There are "ailments" that have proven to be impossible to diagnose, and if you give the same patient to 6 different "experts" you'll get no consistent predictive ability from the diagnostic criteria.

    This is astoundingly common in alternative-medicine. A famous example is determining "acid in the blood" by looking at whether "red blood cells stack". Skeptics drew several samples from the same patient, hand it to the same doctor, claiming it's a sample of several patients, and got several different diagnoses.

    Not being like that is a step up from what CFS had been, medically speaking.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:45PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @06:45PM (#840337)

    That is the same with normal medicine... go to two different doctors/dentists and get totally different treatment plans.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:01PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:01PM (#840351) Journal

      Non-adherence to published standard of care is a real problem, and is probably one of the biggest causes of preventable negative outcomes, but being given the same test on the same subject getting different diagnostic results is exceedingly rare.

      If I shipped your blood from the same sampling to two different medical labs(much less the same lab) and got 2 substantively different results for, say, T-Cell counts, that'd be grounds for potentially closing a lab.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @10:04PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @10:04PM (#840470)

        I avoid the doctor, but I would hope that is what is already always done. In fact, if you need to make a decision based on the result you should use three to see if two are closer than the other. This is standard engineering tech:

        It is common knowledge among designers/architects to have three different inputs so in case one is faulty, input from the remaining two can be used to find (and shut off possibly) the faulty one (two against one).

        https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/61144/why-is-not-every-airplane-equipped-with-3-angle-of-attack-sensors [stackexchange.com]

        If we used non-redundant airplane sensors, it would probably kill fewer people than using non-redundant blood tests.

        Like that forensic lady who sent 20k people to jail based on false test results could have never done that if medical personnel followed guidelines that are standard in other "hard" science/engineering fields: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-results-more-20-000-convictions-dropped-n747891 [nbcnews.com]

        People give these medical people such undeserved slack for no reason.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:30AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:30AM (#840564)

          Those weren't medical tests.

          Those were "tests" meant to generate convictions in a guilty-until-proven-innocent adversarial "justice" system in a war on (some) drugs that's mostly meant to provide a legal pretext for locking up dark skinned people.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:49AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @01:49AM (#840574)

            How many side effects from a bad drug prescription are as bad as being sent to prison for years?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @08:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08 2019, @08:49AM (#840691)

      Oh, shit! You had to bring dentists into it, didn't you! You know what is going to happen now? Well, do you, punk?