On the face of it, it seems reasonable to believe that M.E is either a mental problem or a physical one. It's a virus. It's avoidance behaviour. Take your pick. Yet this extreme distinction is less helpful than we may imagine. My elbow joints are broken - an objective physical limitation on movement - function loss with a clear cut physical cause.
But there's problem. Turns out my behaviour, specifically how I choose to act during the healing process, has a huge influence on outcome. If I wear my sling in these early stages I'll do better than if I try to ignore the problem and act as if the extreme pain is a meaningless evolutionary artefact. My behaviour determines whether my joint will heal at all. My breaks necessitate rest - of course they do. How else can my body have a chance to heal?
But there's more: My behaviour, the way I respond to my *obviously physical and not at all in-my-head broken arms* must change as the healing progresses. Sure, at the start I need to keep the arm supported and at rest "The sling is the treatment!", but as time goes on, if I continue to choose to rest or have my arm confined to a cast long-term, so my chances of a full recovery start to go down. In fact my elbow joints are likely to stiffen up and never return to their original functionality.
M.E can turn out to be as physical as you like: a virus, neuro-toxic exposure, whatever, but this fact does not mean that our response, our behaviour choices suddenly do not matter. My broken bones will heal because will look after them. I will attempt to give them just what they need at the just the right time. To start; this will mean rest but then, as soon as possible, movement.
The treatment changes as the injury heals.
My broken arms may indeed be entirely physical but my condition and its progression toward recovery also rely on my mental attitude and my behavioural response. Together with cast or sling these create a causal loop. If I get the balance right, function will increase and return, if I get it wrong, function will decline and I will lose it forever.
In the broader view, you could say that my bones broke as I hit the concrete, but then, you could just as correctly say that my bones broke because my mind wasn't fast or experienced enough to prevent the fall, or that my common sense should have told me that skateboarding at 50 isn't perhaps the best of ideas. Yet, can we ever say that I am truly recovered before I can return to the skate park with full physical function and having resolved my newfound fear of serious injury?
We are minds in bodies, subjective spirits in the objective world, we are neither exactly one thing nor the other. M.E patients should keep an open mind about both the causes and the cures for their complex and poorly understood condition. Mind and body must work together to achieve healing. And what harms at one stage of recovery may be exactly what the doctor ordered further down the road.
Healing is hard, sorry, them's the breaks.
