How does CFS usually begin?
For a slight majority of patients, the illness begins suddenly as though one had come down with the flu. Except that this “flu” doesn’t seem to completely go away. For many other patients, the onset appears gradually over a long period of time. In many cases, a high-stress event seems to “trigger” the illness. There are many cases in which CFS appears to have begun with a severe head injury, for example. But since such events seem to have no apparent logical connection to the illness that follows, many have speculated that the CFS was latent in people beforehand in these cases, and that the stress of trauma merely triggered the stress-hypersensitivity aspect of the illness. Some have further speculated that other stressful factors in our environment, be they microbes or pollution, may also prompt this illness to bloom.
