Introduction
Waging war requires ….. energy, which in the end, depletes the operator and concerns the relationship between energy and stress. When the operators are human beings, it may happen that a stage is reached such that the demands being made exceed their resources to cope ….. the symptoms of such resultant stress have been given a variety of labels – shellshock, lack of moral fibre, twitch, war neurosis, battle fatigue and now post-traumatic stress disorder ……’. This is a paraphrased account of Norman Dixon’s penetrating assessment of post-Gulf War battle stress in The Times Saturday Review of the 26 January 1991. It would apply equally to the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which also has a variety of labels including the post-viral fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, Royal Free disease, fibromyalgia, epidemic neuromyaesthenia, yuppy ‘flu disease, chronic Epstein-Barr virus syndrome and Iceland disease. The major clinical feature is of incapacitating fatigue, often accompanied by widespread myalgia and low-spiritedness.
You can read the rest if this article here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2399560/pdf/postmedj00068-0012.pdf
Source: James DG1, Brook MG, Bannister BA. The chronic fatigue syndrome. Postgrad Med J. 1992 Aug;68(802):611-4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1448399