At a conference held in the UK last week, Jonathan Kerr of St. George’s University of London spoke about his looking into the genes of 27 people with CFS and 54 controls where he found differences in 100 genes out of the nearly 47,000 looked at. What came out of the study was a treatment protocol that will be looked at in more depth. It was the use of beta interferon to look into enhancing the immune system and natural killer cells.

An osteopath who also attended the conference claimed that most of the 1,000 cases of CFS he has seen appeared to have problems with lymphatic drainage issues that responded well to massage. Dr. Kerr said “There is a rationale for why it works.  It’s non-specific, but manual lymphatic drainage is a good thing.”

Dr. Basant Puri of the Hammersmith Hospital in London said that many patients he saw responded well to a combination of EPA and evening primrose oils.

The biggest thing to come out of the conference was that underlying causes are different from one person to another and that one solution is unlikely to fit everyone.  Captain Obvious pops his head up and laughs once again. Something I have been saying for about 2 decades is that we are all different biochemically as well as genetically and to try to use a one shoe size fits all model is ridiculous. Modern protocol medicine refuses to take this into account which is why so many people are suffering from side-effects of drug therapies. The idea of metabonomics must overcome this shortfall and force the health care community to treat people as individuals and not as homogenous reflections of population studies. It can be done. Carbon Based Corporation has been doing it for years with their CellMate reports.