Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) from Shingles?

Hi and welcome to my blog, which is about how I ended up being diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). It explaining how I believe I ended up with this condition, how it has affected me and how I am trying to deal with it at the moment.

My initial blog posts give you the history of how I believe I ended up being finally diagnosed with CFS. If you read the numbered posts that you see in the Blog Archive list to the right starting from number 1 "What is this all about?" then you will read my story below in the correct sequence.

I hope you find this blog interesting and will give some feedback if you believe you have CFS from the same cause as mine and perhaps indicate if and what treatment or strategies etc are helping you to recover or deal with your CFS.


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13. My suggested way forward.

From my research on Post Herpetic Neuralgia I found a very useful medical journal article about its possible treatments. One of the main points the article made was that it was rare for patients to respond to a single therapy and that a simultaneous multi drug approach would be more successful.

I therefore went to my doctor with my hypothesis and the article information and discussed my findings and asked that I be prescribed the medication to try the multi drug approach described in the article.

My doctor certainly appeared to consider that my explanation as to why I was suffering from CFS was a reasonable theory. However my doctor was initially reluctant to prescribe all three drugs at once, indicating that we would not know which were helping and also there was the problem that the strong pain killer Tramadol mentioned in the article is an Opioid based drug and so has the potential to become addictive. I persisted pointing out that by that time I had already not worked for four years, so perhaps a more radical action was required and by now my doctor should know that I am logical and sensible about taking medication.

He agreed and prescribed the following three drugs:-

Gabapentin which I was already taking and appeared to be improving things for me slightly.

Tramadol is a strong (Opioid based) painkiller.

Amitriptyline is an antidepressant which I had already tried on its own without much improvement.

My doctor indicated that I should start taking just the Tramadol with the Gabapentin tablets I was already taking and see how I got on with these tablets for a week or so and then also start taking Amitriptyline. In this way I would at least know which drug may have caused any side effects.

We also agreed how many of each type of tablets I could take and how I could try varying the dose of each tablet one at a time in an attempt to find the best combination for me.

When I started taking the Amitriptyline tablet, which was just one very low dose at night, I noticed that I felt tired the next day. So my doctor prescribed Nortriptyline another antidepressant which had been shown to help relieve PHN.

Go to Part14. More progress, I did some work!