CFS and the Immune System
In 1988 our family caught a flu virus. I was in bed for three weeks with such extreme vertigo that I needed help going up and down the stairs to the bathroom. Three of us did not fully recover. CFS often is described as having “flu-like symptoms,” however, its symptoms can be broader and worse than most flu.
My symptoms continued, sometimes with and sometimes without debilitating vertigo. I struggled to maintain my work and family responsibilities. I drew on the discipline of my academic training to force myself to concentrate on manuscripts. Some days I had to stop working. I began turning down new assignments. Our planned expansion of our business, house renovations, and my ceramics studio had to be abandoned. My involvement in the children’s schools and the community stopped, too, except for minimal church attendance. Mild exercise, such as tossing a Frisbee or a bag of kitchen scraps into the compost, caused permanent muscle damage. I consulted doctors, who told me flu could be hard to recover from; one thought I might have lupus.
We had been sick for four years. After being out of the country for a year we changed doctors. Our daughter caught a virus and became dangerously ill. The new doctor recognized the syndrome. We underwent extensive testing to eliminate other illnesses, including lupus. After a few weeks he diagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in each of us. The consensus today is that the syndrome is caused by immune system dysfunction. My husband had more and different symptoms from mine; our daughter was essentially bedridden for a year and lost her two last years of high school and anything like normal life for the next two years. We suffered four more years.
Another patient had given me the ME/CFIDS Checklist of Dr. Jay Goldstein, which is reproduced in the Appendix of Listening for the Light. One of three pioneering physicians, Goldstein had compiled statistics of symptoms and their frequency among his patients, listing more than 54 symptoms of this mysterious illness. The Canadian expert in that group was Dr. Byron Hyde of Ottawa. His clinic associate saw our daughter and me, confirming our doctor’s CFS diagnosis. There was no known cure or treatment.
In 1997, I experienced a dramatic healing of my CFS at The Listening Centre. A year later, after our daughter decided that Daniel’s schizophrenia was not a result of his dyslexic syndrome treatment at The Listening Centre, she accepted an offer to go there to be treated for her CFS. She, too, experienced a dramatic healing of her CFS symptoms within five days. Later, Richard used The Listening Centre’s LiFT® program at home for his CFS. While his improvements were significant, he did not experience as dramatic a healing as I. Since then, we have used binaural listening and Focused Listening to improve and maintain our health.
Today, I realize that the immune system, which is comprised of blood factors, a patch of cells in the gut, and hormones produced in the brain, is controlled by the stapedius muscle in the right ear by a fibre of the vagus network lying on it. By strengthening the right ear’s stapedius muscle, Focused Listening stimulates and co-ordinates the components of the immune system. Following up Focused Listening with binaural listening is beneficial.
“We discovered that many individuals suffering from allergic disorders such as asthma, hay fever, and eczema had hearing peaks in both ears at the frequencies of 1,000, 1,500, and 2,000 Hz. … That this connection between the allergic problem and hyperacute hearing is significant is indicated by the fact that after appropriate treatment, auditory training which normalized the audiogram and removed the peak or peaks at those frequencies, the patient’s symptoms disappeared.” (Guy Bérard, Hearing Equals Behavior, 42).