This understanding of CFS-ME, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in most of the world, and, as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in North America, is paralleled to the major growth realities of the Butterfly Bush.

Most persons who have CFS-ME cannot repeatedly spend many thousands of dollars and years of treatment time following one illness protocol after another with no assurance other than that they MAY recover. This approach suggests that the PACKAGE of illnesses they have will abate if they are successful in treating a singular primary health weakening influence. There is a common assumption that there is only one tree trunk or one dominant influence that needs to be focused on and that all branches or associated health weaknesses will follow the lead of the condition of the healing trunk.

If the one cause assumption is incorrect, such efforts are of no more benefit than walking into a dark room and shinning a flashlight only to the right in search of a light switch, because that is the direction you have often previously been successful in finding one. If the switch is elsewhere, or if turning on multiple switches is necessary before the lights come on, you will never turn on the lights and will leave frustrated blaming the electrical engineer for not having constructed something simpler and an extension of what you already know and expect. This is neither scientific in approach or helpful with a multi-faceted reality.

The scientific and clinically successful approaches to the treatment of CFS-ME to early 2007 all confirm that those persons diagnosed with CFS-ME are expressing a PACKAGE of at least 4 active, distinct, and widely different diseases from a potential from a selection of 8. This variability between patients confirms several realities. There can be a great variability in the PACKAGES or stump clumps of illnesses which become expressed with similar symptom pictures. Most of the patients APPEAR to have the same illness but the reality is that many will have widely different PACKAGES of illnesses from the others.

These illness realities conflict with healthcare treatment norms.
This makes diagnosis and treatment of the individual patient much more difficult, time consuming, and costly, than doctors and healthcare workers are exposed to regularly or educated to resolve. It also mandates that if such an aggressive diagnostic approach is not taken to find all of the TRUNKS before beginning a treatment protocol, the likelihood of a REMEDIAL outcome is more certain than one of RECOVERY. While this may temporarily raise the spirits of patients, the almost certain repeated and disabling RE-OCCURRENCE of their symptoms will encourage despair.

The Butterfly Bush, Buddleia davidii, through some of the states of the USA, is regarded as a noxious plant/bush. It originated in China. It adapts quickly to changes in climate by way of mutations and there are now variations in most temperate climate countries. In some Canadian provinces and other states, it is greeted as a very hardy bush which can grow to a height of 10 feet in a season. Cold weather can kill it so it is not as hardy as it is invasive. It provides a display of many fragrant and colorful flowers, which attract many species of butterflies. It frequently can preoccupy us with its beauty and vitality until its disorderly spread has made it into a stubborn garden problem.

A Buddleia seedling in poor soil often comes up fast and strong and kills whatever else is nearby. It tolerates pollution and alkaline soil better than most other plants, prefers sun, and has a tendency to spread out of control. Each fall, it can be cut back to a foot or so in height with no resulting restriction on the growth of the bush through the next Spring to Fall. No other plant seems able to compete successfully with it, as a natural limiting influence on its spread. Once established, almost no chemical nor partial removal will deter its presence or growth.

The Butterfly Bush does not have one trunk.
It can quite commonly have 4, 8, or more trunks with branches forming off of these. Removing as many trunks as you wish will not kill the plant nor seriously limit it unless you forcefully dig up the complete multiple trunk root. If you wish to transplant it as a growing bush, you cannot split the PACKAGE of trunks that form one root ball. Splitting the trunks apart will result in many of those dying. The one or one's which do survive will regenerate a new PACKAGE of trunks which may eventually exceed the numbers in the earlier plant.

Eight parallels exist between what we know of CFS-ME
and the Butterfly Bush.
1. It will grow in ecologies where other plants die or survive with greater difficulty.
2. It is a persistent living entity which does not require any nurturing once it is present.
3. It often grows fast and can smother out other plants in its spread.
4. Its survival is not dependent on the nutritive health of the soil.
5. It is deceptive in that it looks like a simple bush, yet can form a real thicket.
6. There are multiple trunks or major growth entities involved; neither a singular or branched trunk.
7. Removing one or several of those trunks provides only a temporary restriction on the plant presence.
8. If you want to remove it, you must dig it out as a clump and not just prune it or cut off trunks and branches.

What I, and perhaps many other CFS-ME patients have found, is that we may enthusiastically follow health enhancing approaches which are successful in removing ONE trunk of our illness. Worse, we may follow what has worked well to enable others with similar thickets of illness, yet a different overall selection of trunks, to remove one or more of their trunks, only to find no benefit for ourselves regardless of time, energy, or finances devoted. We may even become MORE ill in the longer-term! Measures which may restrict or diminish one of the trunks of someone else may actually feed and enhance the presence of one of our own. Some of those others may recover completely. This is even more discouraging when we do not and our healthcare resource or doctor tells us to simply persist longer, that we are past the recovery stage, or that few people can truly recover past a remission stage. WHY?

If we have been intent on treating the wrong PACKAGE, the protocol is not relevant for us. What may be best for us, may not be the best treatment PACKAGE for a spouse, friend, neighbor, etc. Testing for most of the usual illness TRUNKS involved in CFS-ME is often highly specific and individually costly. Receiving effective treatment for EACH of these trunks is often highly specific, longer-term, and also very costly. In addition, there are few healthcare professionals who are aware of all the major potential trunk contributors to CFS-ME presence. Few doctors are aware of the diagnostic testing available and few of their patients would be willing to spend thousands of dollars on diagnostic tests and history review and discovery interviews before taking ANY action towards a hoped for recovery.

In the politics of health insurance, medical institutionalization, and government financial assistance --- there is usually NO SUPPORT for either the diagnosis of this PACKAGE of illnesses, nor the multiple treatment pathways. This IS understandable, in early 2007, for as long as singular and simplistic trunk factors are grasped for in a rush to define and treat this multifactoral PACKAGE of illness, only failure will result. In an economic climate focused on least cost, it is frequently misdiagnosed and mistreated with the host often being blamed for presenting an illness which reveals the ignorance of the physician and the arrogance of the medical community.

The demanding economic environment in which most health professionals work encourages all of the traits likely to lead to failure: short introductory and follow-up appointments, insurance plan coverage, a medically accepted simplistic form of diagnosis and treatment, low financial input from patients, a minimal health awareness about themselves and this PACKAGE of illnesses by the patient, authoritarian acceptance of the healthcare provider, self-denial, unending patience.

For those strong enough in will to potentially recover, the opposite factors are frequently necessary, and, easy to be rejected by those unwilling to consider new formats of treatment, and, those encouraged to be defensive by patients who often feel, deservedly, abandoned and marginalized by the healthcare and government agents proclaimed as their saviors and defenders for most of their healthy and unhealthy lives. The health professional wants to remain economically productive for the sustaining of their personal, family, and professional lives. The economic and political climate in which they must work for a sanction of their career freedom, rewards them, often even shackles them, to approaches that lack effectiveness and are usually uneconomical over the longer-term for the treatment of CFS-ME.

What is a patient with CFS-ME to do if they want to recover?
1. Don't expect others to find your diagnosis and cure you.
2. Acknowledge the economic and political realities they are part of.
3. Learn as much about the major contributing illnesses to CFS-ME.
4. Find out which tests are effective in diagnosing and who can provide them.
5. Become intimate with one's own health history through history charting.
6. Determine if you can afford to private pay for diagnostic testing.
7. Run as wide a range of tests as you can economically justify.
8. Recognize that inadequate testing will result in longer and less likely recovery.
9. Choose the most likely or clearly known protocols that are relevant for you.
10. Search for a doctor and other practitioners who are willing to provide most or all of these.
11. Devote time, energy, patience, and persistence to maintaining hope and following the protocols.
12. Encourage change through tactful communication with your government, insurance, media, healthcare representatives.

All of this is an extreme challenge for anyone with CFS-ME.
It is like having to do rock climbing, long-distance swimming, or race a mile while carrying someone on one's back who is of equal weight! Many of you won't have the willpower. The strain is also counterproductive to the symptoms. In early 2007, there is no one else, for most of us, who will make the effort for any price. Most of us could not afford a relevant payment for the person competent to do so.

Towards CFS-ME Recovery,