Chronic fatigue is a syndrome characterized by extreme fatigue that is generally not linked to another underlying medical condition. The fatigue tends to get worse with physical or mental demands and is often not improved even with sufficient rest. Symptoms often include challenges sleeping, chronic pain, foggy head and digestive disorders. The CDC estimates that 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from CFS and about 90 percent of people with CFS have not been diagnosed.

There are three manifestations of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that one might see discussed.

• 1. Chronic fatigue - Generally as described above where the key factor is fatigue not linked with other known conditions. Causal influence is often labeled as chronic unpredictable stress from long-term overwork without the proper recovery and/or nutrition.
• 2. Chronic fatigue immunodeficiency syndrome - Often as described above but usually involves an experience where one gets sick regularly often after a more demanding illness (mono, Lyme, COVID, etc). This pattern may also occur while a latent pathogen is still present, so differentiation is important to improving long-term results.
• 3. Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) - This version of chronic fatigue syndrome (i.e. ME/CFS) is often the most demanding experience related to this category. It tends to be a long-term illness that can affect many body systems.

Chronic fatigue as a syndrome cannot be diagnosed by a single test and in many cases it is a diagnosis arrived at by ruling out all other possibilities. Often chronic fatigue is experienced in association with many other symptoms which furthers the effort to rule out other diseases or instigating conditions. Unfortunately, this also complicates progress as the individual is going untreated as the diagnostics continue.

The standard of care for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome focuses on symptom relief, whereas at Everspring Health our integrative strategy focuses on peeling back the layers of the root influences of your chronic fatigue to sufficiently dissolve the issue. Our treatment strategy goes beyond management of symptoms; we develop an Foundational Care program including nutrition, exercise, manual therapy (acupuncture, massage, etc) to provide you with a productive, progressive long-term solution. We start by understanding your past and current health history, in order to narrow down the primary influential factors. The benefits of Everspring Health’s approach is that most often something can be done to pursue a level of normal of function while diagnostics continue to rule out any other issues that may need to be addressed. One does not have to wait and see for us to support recovery.

The challenges one should understand when successfully addressing chronic fatigue is that progress may be slow and sporadic until certain benchmarks of time are met using consistent therapy throughout that time. One should be prepared to engage and invest in a program for at least 90 days so that enough progress can be made and then understood to create a lifestyle that can further the program and ideally dissolve the condition while seeking to prevent it from returning.