Can you sum up what the book 'Cure' asks us to do then with our heads?
I wouldn't say that it asks us to do anything really other than look at some of the more recent science regarding how the mind and body interact.
An example I found particularly relevant...Tim Noakes is a sports physiologist at University of Cape Town in S Africa. He did studies that found that athletes were dying due to over-hydration during marathons. His work was rejected in the US though, due to the billion dollar a year sports drink market until 13% of the participants in the 2002 Boston Marathon suffered water intoxication.
So he's studying muscles and how they behave when they approach exhaustion. He says that the dogma around this is that athletes get tired when "their bodies hit physical limits - their muscles run out of oxygen or fuel, or become damaged by the accumulation of toxic by-products such as lactic acid. This in turn triggers pain and fatigue, forcing us to stop exercising until we recover."
More quoting from the book:
"This basic theory had never been questioned since it was proposed by Nobel Prize wining physiologist Archibald Hill in 1923. Yet when Noakes tried to test it, his results didn't make sense. First, Hill's theory predicted that if athletes exercise to their limit, then shortly before they stop with exhaustion, oxygen use should level off, because the heart can't pump fast enough to get any more oxygen to the tissues that need it. But just as with the experiments at high altitude, that didn't happen...
Meanwhile other studies have shown that although levels of fuel inside muscles (glycogen, fat, ATP) diminish with exercise, they never run out. Noakes also studied muscle use, by asking cyclists to ride exercise bikes with wires attached to their legs. Hill's theory says that athletes should recruit all available resources as they tire, engaging more and more muscle fibers until, with nothing more to give, they finally hit the breaking point. But Noakes found the reverse. As the cyclists neared exhaustion, muscle fibers were being switched off. At the point at which his volunteers said they felt too fatigued to continue, they were never activating more than about 50% of their available muscle fibers. Exhaustion forced them to stop exercising, yet they had a large reserve of muscle just waiting to be used.
All of this convinced Noakes that the old idea - of fatigue being caused by muscles pushed to the limit - couldn't be true. Instead, he and his colleague, Alan St Clair Gibson, proposed that the feeling of fatigue is imposed centrally, by the brain."
Well, I don't know about you, but that sure as heck seems relevant to the hypothesis that MECFS is a *brain* problem at the heart of it to me.