The Times reports ‘GPs give rest cure its marching orders’.

From @Daisybell 's quote

Well, I can tell you right now from experience, exercise is absolutely no good when you have an undiagnosed or under medicated thyroid condition, or if you are anaemic...... It will not help and you will most certainly feel worse.

I am sure there are lots of other conditions as well.

 

erm....no, it's logically correct, if you want to make someone fatigued treating them with exercise is a good way of doing it - regardless of any health issues, treatment with enough exercise will make them fatigued, continue and they will be persistently fatigued, persistently.

They may also get a tad grouchy, and test scores on a grouchiness scale may increase, at least until someone develops a questionnaire to determine questionnaire fatigue.

Of course this may not be what they were implying.

 

The trouble is, there will be some fatigue conditions where exercise may help. Being deconditioned is probably one, providing there is nothing else going on. And if someone really and truly does have depression-related fatigue, and not fatigue due to any other cause, then the exercise activity may act like any other form of occupational therapy, it may be the diversionary activity as much as the exercise that is beneficial. But to apply this strategy without being confident of what the underlying cause is, and confident it is not going to harm, should be bordering on criminal.

 

This is always something that's struck me. Depression isn't a cause, right? It's a symptom of one of many physiological issues. If your depression is caused by low thyroid hormone, you need more thyroid hormone. If your depression is caused by poor blood flow to the brain, perhaps some standard OI treatments could help.

Just throwing it out there that I'm not sure why we consider depression "its own thing, independent of biological processes".

 

I think that's probably the thin end of a very complex wedge. As I reported in another thread, my mother had deep clinical depression, which I would not be at all surprised if they one day really do prove is due physiological issues affecting brain function. She would lay in bed all day, but I never understood if this was fatigue as such, or more apathy related. I also suspect that people who are more "normally" depressed (i.e. with clear/obvious reason, such as losing a loved one), can risk becoming profoundly introverted and apathetic, and present as a form of fatigue.

Not sure I quite understand "Depression isn't a cause, right?". I would think it can in some cases lead to all manner of symptoms.

 

I misspoke, @Barry, re: 'cause' -- I mean to say that depression itself appears to be a symptom of a multitude of different illnesses, rather than its own, encapsulated 'thing'.

 

Got it. And I think this is where 'depression' gets as muddled and confusing as 'fatigue' does. More often than not, as best I as a layman understands, depression is a secondary symptom of some other condition. But in cases of real clinical depression it, as best I understand, can be an independent clinical diagnosis in its own right, though often comes with other mental health baggage as well - schizophrenia, psychosis, etc, such that the lines can get blurred.

 

I wouldn't consider there to be a more real and less real depression by severity or by the general impression that it is a primary symptom for the patient.

Mental illness originates from physiological processes, and depression the symptom can be due to a panoply of different physiological processes going awry rather than just one.

But we are firmly off-topic so I'll close this off here for my part.