Monkeyfilter

Well, I thought Kitfisto was *spectacular*. It's actually a slightly more complicated diagnosis than that. Milady mothninja had both CFS-like symptoms, and some very uncomfortable eczema. Thing was, none of the specialists dealing with each of these things looked at the two in concert, nor checked back far enough. Moth had only had the eczema since she was 14 or so, two years after the CFS symptoms started. The eczema started on her top lip, then spread outwards. I found research that showed that a staph A infection could look just like eczema - and more than that, there's *no*such*thing* as Adult-onset eczema. You have it from birth or near to it, or you have something else. Soooo...I figured that the skin thing was a Staph A infection. The nose thing is important because Staph A is cleared from the body by antibiotics everywhere but the nasal cavity. (This is why surgeons wear masks. Your sinuses harbour stuff even when you've been drugged to oblivion.) Staph A decolonisation, as it's called, involves lots of antibiotics, and also an specific anti-bacterial nose gel thing, called Bactroban. All the previous treatments had left out the Bactroban, so they had only worked for a while, before the staph climbed down out of the nose and reinfected everywhere. Anyway, treating this properly fixed the skin. But I also found a lot of research about allegeric reactions to a thing called Staph A Exotoxin. There are a few papers linking Staph A Exotoxin allergy to, amongst other things, fatigue, brain-fog, depression, and feeling generally shit. All good old fashioned CFS symptoms. So, the theory I came up with was that the Staph A in moth's sinuses were dripping exotoxin into her throat and onto her skin. The skin droplets were causing atopic dermititis, which looks like eczema, and the throat stuff was causing a huge allergic reaction, leading to an IgE count of 3500, and the symptoms of CFS. Turns out I was right. Now, this is a test group of one, but I think there must be quite a large group of people out there with specific infections to which they are secondarily *allergic* - not reacting in a viral way, but reacting to a secreted toxin, or an otherwise normal by product of the bacteria or parasite. I'm not saying that CFS isn't a genuine condition. But I think it's a hugely "everything else" type label, and doctors need to take all symptoms someone has, no matter how apparently genetic (like, say, eczema) they are.

posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName 17 years ago

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