The Clymer Healing and Research Center

Over the years, I've tried many, many things to heal my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS, CFIDS), but nothing was able to really help me. Some things helped at first but only up to a point. Then, it was like they hit a brick wall.

At first, like most people I tried conventional medicine, but the anti-depressant medications and stimulants didn't help the core issue. They just helped some of the symptoms a tiny bit, but not enough, in my opinion, to warrant all the negative side-effects. Stimulants, especially, seemed like the wrong approach. I mean, I'm tired already, so artificially stimulating my system with a drug is a short term fix that will eventually deplete my system still further.

I also paid for many expensive medical tests, such as an MRI scan of my brain, but they all came up "normal."

After all this, I concluded that conventional medicine simply cannot help CFS. (To be fair, I must admit that I have not yet tried some of the newer therapies such as the anti-viral therapy , but since these therapies involve highly toxic substances, I would only turn to them in desperation after all else has failed. I've come to regard the entire approach of conventional medicine as skewed, as it is rarely about healing anymore. Instead it's about symptom relief, which is usually (some would say always) bought at a dear price. )

I then tried many alternative approaches. See article: My Healing Journey With CFS for details on the things I've tried.

The Clymer Healing and Research Center was founded by a man named Dr. Gerald Poesnecker, and he dedicated his life to the treatment of CFS. This is what I believe sets him apart from all the other healers I've tried.

CFS is unlike any other disease that afflicts humankind, and so it needs to be treated differently. If a healer isn't aware of its unique needs, their standard approach will most likely fail and, in fact, often have harmful results. (For more on how CFS is different than other illnesses, see Dr. Poesnecker's book, Chronic Fatigue Unmasked 2000. This is a fantastic book that I highly recommend to anyone with CFS. If you feel alone in the world, misunderstood, and think your symptoms are bizarre, read this book! It explains the mechanism behind all the strange symptoms that CFS produces. I nearly wept, reading it.)

The Clymer Healing and Research website has a lot of information on it, so I won't repeat it all here. Suffice it to say that they have over forty years of experience treating CFS and Fibromyalgia.

Basically, Dr. Poesnecker was a natural healer trained in classical Naturopathy who decided to specialize in the treatment of CFS because no one else would due to its difficulty. Clymer has since become one of the leading authorities on CFS in the world. They keep abreast of all the latest developments and actually test them for effectiveness, only keeping things that actually work. It's this integrity that impressed me about them.

If you do decide to work with them, they recommend coming to the center in Pennsylvania, but you can also be treated by phone. Their rates are very reasonable also, especially compared to modern medicine.

Be ready to be patient, however. Their approach is to truly heal you, and this usually involves a long period where the adrenal gland must be shut down to recouperate. Often this will make it feel like there's no progress or that you feel even worse, and this can last for many months or even longer.

At the time of this writing (April 2005) I have been working with them for a little less than a year, and honestly, though there has not been a miracle cure, I do feel a gradual change toward health. I spent a year nearly bed-ridden after a particularly difficult time of my life, but finally I feel a little more energy. (This website had been on my to-do list for two years!)

It's important not to waste this energy, however, by immediately making up for lost time and jumping back into life. That energy must be used for healing. You must discipline yourself and learn how to relax. People with CFS are commonly highly ambitious people who fuel their drive with a deep sense of responsibility, even guilt.

I've come to see CFS as a gift, a great lesson that I could never have learned otherwise. I was a very stubborn type, believing I could bend the world to my will, and so the only way I could learn was the hard way.

In addition to more energy, my appetite, which has been the scourge of my existence since I came down with CFS, has improved. In the beginning, I lived in a constant state of bloated nausea so that every bite was an ordeal. The other treatments I tried before Clymer helped, but still, eating was a grueling chore for me. When I read in Dr. Poesnecker's book that sometimes his patients with this problem eventually become so ravenous that he had to then work to curtail the very appetite he'd had to work so hard to achieve, I could hardly believe it. Now I feel it happening.

Better too are the nervous rushing thoughts that would keep me awake at night and agitated during the day. Dr. Poesnecker says that the root of CFS is a burned out adrenal gland. It reaches a point where the only way it can provide the body with enough energy to go on is to stay in a constant state of fight or flight, in other words, using the body's "emergency mode" all the time. This results in many of the CFS symptoms, including my uncontrollable thoughts and constant nervousness.

I plan to provide updates on my healing progress with the Clymer Center on this page. Dr. Neville (Dr. Poesnecker's protege and successor) told me that a ballpark figure for how long their treatments take is one month for every year you've been sick, but I think my case may take longer since I'm doing the out-patient program and therefore don't have access to all of their treatments. We'll see, won't we!