New Zealand: Dr Vallings

First I've heard of this and does not apply to me. I've always had delayed sleep, now better but on average for many years it took me about 2 hours to fall asleep. But once I'm asleep, I rarely wake up until morning. I feel like crap, as if I hadn't slept at all, but that's another thing. I'm relatively easy to wake up if there's a loud enough noise but that rarely ever happens. I often sleep through thunderstorms and such.

I think it's just a bad interpretation from some people's obsession with anxiety in this disease and making some weird connection to unrefreshing sleep. Just taking two different puzzle pieces and smashing the edges just well enough to be able make a case that they might fit together if you look from the right angle.

 

agreed. I've years ago having slept through alarm for something extremely important often found that I'd managed to sleep with my actual ear on said phone alarm. And as we all know they don't turn off for a bit unless you snooze them. Particularly when the tiredness had cumulatively 'built up' it would be just dead to the world sleep. Sometimes landing when you planned because you knew you'd have to sleep for days, sometimes you just didn't get to the end of the week before it hit.

the only time sleep would be funny or light would be if some idiot was trying to force sleep hygeine and hence your body was not wanting to sleep at that time and yet you were trying to force it. or when in the 'resting to be able to sleep' phase, when you get so tired that you need good rest (and less good sleep) in order to be functioning enough your body then goes into that dead to the world stuff.

the fun bit is that you always seem to be able to find someone who thinks they have or had CFS or actually does who has completely different patterns. Massive issue with being able to manipulate results and external validity with such a heterogenous condition and set of patients currently.

'like dogs' nice

 

I don't know anything about whether what I'm about to say is nonsense because I'm only quoting a few I know but this sounds more like what might work for people wiht fibromyalgia, some of whom say they need to 'do some movement' etc and it sounds pretty different to the now 'PEM' description of ME/CFS.

I think that this often overlapping condition (and there are probably others) is a discussion we need to bring up as we at least know more about ME /CFS given what we know about how in the past whether you got given one diagnosis or the other or both might have been as dependent on the physician you saw as what you had. And even the pain heuristic now makes a bit less sense - because you can get pretty agonising pain from PEM but that operates differently to FM pain?

Even when we are talking about those who have both being able to 'get' this differentiation is pretty key surely. Imagine having both - if it is the case that some movement helps FM, but you are at a severity for ME/CFS where it gives you pain and exhaustion from doing it etc?! They are going to need to have some pretty useful help in working out how to manage that - and the cognitive load of not having decent people yet in getting how PEM workds when trying to figure out your schedule and adjustments combining with PEM/ME..

 

Is this website still being maintained and updated? Dr Vallings retired some time ago.

Probably wishful thinking but if it is the case Dr Vallings' website is no longer being updated then the most effective strategy may be to simply point that out to the national health info website admins and suggest a more current alternative, rather than getting tangled up in the weeds of the content