I'm going to pull together everything I know about living with fatigue - current scientific research, what I know after living with it for the last 17 years, and what you might expect if you find yourself completely wiped out.
Firstly, fatigue is heterogeneous - it has diverse causes and affects people in different ways. This means it takes a reasonable amount of investigation to find the cause.
Secondly, no-one really knows (scientifically) what makes fatigue happen - there's not a single hormone or gene that directly makes someone tired. This means that people can claim anything they like about a cure or supposed treatment because a) it might work for someone and b) there's no way to categorically say whether something works or not because no-one really knows.
Luckily, there is a diagnostic pathway to explore that helps us understand some common causes of fatigue and what we might do to alleviate the problems. This is reassuring because once you've exhausted all the likely causes of fatigue, you can move on to next step of the process.
Finally, if you've had a specific illness or operation or trauma and you have been left with fatigue then I'll be collating all the things we can do to help manage this most difficult of conditions.
