Towards Understanding Liminal Fatigue in Nursing, 2019, Flores et al

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1071181319631256

 

Around 2 years before I fell ill with ME after infection as a teenager, I started to feel a little burnt out by around 9 PM most nights.

Also around 6 weeks before I fell ill, I felt quite tired and didn't feel I had had a chance to rest over a vacation period so I decided to cut back a bit on some of my extracurricular activities.

I'm pretty sure I didn't have ME before I believe I got it as I was able to play or train for sports 7-10 times a week with fitness at a high enough level.

I do wonder if I had cut back a bit more and maybe adjusted my lifestyle a little (I only slept around 8 hours a night as a teenager when I see longer durations being recommended now), whether I might have been able to avoid getting ME.

 

I don't think so.

I think there is a key difference between CFS or ME and the 'burnout' or 'overtraining syndrome' that athletes suffer from. The key difference is that these athletes (recent example: Joe Burns) frequently recover.

 

I’m not sure that disproves my query. I’m saying the burnout or overtraining syndrome or whatever one might call the fatigue I had might have left me vulnerable/be a risk factor to getting ME or CFS (if faced with an infection as I was at a “bad time”), not that they are the same thing.

 

It's not really fair to say it has been studied extensively considering 1) not true, it's largely considered unimportant despite very much being so, 2) absolutely no progress has been made in understanding it and 3) the parenthesis explains why, the concept has been stripped of all meaning and is used as a catch-all for several distinct things.

I had chronic fatigue for years before ME. It's nothing like it. Yet there are people who insist it is. Those people are typically the prominent researchers of "fatigue", meaning the "experts" in the topic are entirely clueless and confused about the very topic they claim expertise in.

This is not the right way to understand something and it's no surprise we still don't, it's the only possible outcome from the current process.