> one of my friends "had CFS" and was "cured"... she had anaemia Just so we're clear, this point is not in debate at all. There are indeed many possible cause

> one of my friends "had CFS" and was "cured"... she had anaemia Just so we're clear, this point is not in debate at all. There are indeed many possible causes of fatigue which need to be looked into. I'm sure many of them get lumped into the catch-all category of CFS before someone realizes there is a less obscure cause than EBV/HHV-6 infection. On the other hand, my case was characterized by two phenomena which, AFAIK, are quite specific for EBV/HHV-6. (And yes, I mean "specific" in the statistical sense: they are rarely associated with any other condition, and thus, as diagnostic cues, would generate few false positives.) The first is the fact that my symptoms began after a flu-like illness, and were clearly not present before that illness. The second is that I would have the symptoms as much as 48 hours after exercise. I'm not a doctor or medical researcher, but I have yet to hear of another disease with that property. Many illnesses make exercise unpleasant, but they tend to do so at the time the exercise is taking place, or right afterwards. A 48-hour delay is bizarre. (My SWAG(†) is that it has to do with the release of growth hormone during the post-exercise recovery process. Growth hormone triggers neurogenesis, among other things, and I suspect that the virus is somehow taking advantage of or interfering with neurogenesis. Just a thought.) († SWAG = Scientific Wild-Assed Guess) > Given that CFS is not defined, I would strongly challenge anyone claiming that such-and-such is "proven" with regards to it. Fair enough, but cfshacker also has a point: some doctors have tried for years to treat CFS as a "mental illness", with very limited success. Now to the main point: > I strongly agree with you that mental illnesses have a very strong physical component, if not being completely physical. Well, if that's where you're coming from, why even use the term "mental"? If you think that your condition was rooted in a neurotransmitter imbalance or something like that, why not just say that? Then we're not debating whether it had an organic cause, we're just debating what kind of organic cause. The irony is, I absolutely do believe in psychosomatic illness. But I believe its causes are emotional. If the cause is actually physical, it seems to me this contradicts the very definition of "psychosomatic". EDIT: formatting.