I am both a person with lived experience and a health care professional. I became ill with ME/CFS, FM and MCS in 1989 during my second year of psychiatry residency. Subsequently I have been diagnosed with several related conditions including, Lyme disease, orthostatic intolerance, joint hypermobility and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. As a result of my illness experience and the lack of available medical care, I decided to devote my career to learning more so I could help myself and others. I didn&#8217;t have a lot of hope of recovery but I kept putting one foot in front of the next.
I tried everything I could access from both conventional and integrative treatments. For the first 27 years nothing led to substantive or lasting change. Then, in 2017, my health improved substantially and I have been able to return to many of the activities I love like travelling to beautiful nature locations.
Surprisingly, the things I was doing at the time of my recovery were all low tech: sleep strategies, diet change, pacing, using neuroplasticity to rewire my brain and actively looking for hope &#8211; no injections, experimental supplement protocols or off label drugs.
From this, I deduced that there is more hope of recovery than I had thought during the years of chasing a high tech cure. I started reading the literature on the impact of &#8220;lifestyle modification&#8221; and have found extensive evidence that the choices we every day impact our biology. I have been teaching these effective strategies to my patients and online participants and they are reporting improvements. We have much more power than we think.
I am retiring from medical practice at the end of 2022 to move online and share what I have learned about how to heal from chronic, complex diseases using inexpensive, accessible, safe lifestyle modification tools.

Eleanor Stein, MD