In 2009, writer and journalist Nick Duerden was on a work-related trip to the U.S. when he shared a four-hour car journey with a person who was visibly suffering from the flu—likely the H1N1 virus, a hybrid of human, swine, and avian components. The following morning, Duerden was struck with the symptoms of acute influenza: dizziness, exhaustion, fever, sweats, and chills. He managed to catch his flight home to London, and spent the next two weeks in bed. It was the illest he’d ever been in his life. A year later, he had another bout of influenza—a milder one this time, yet he strangely couldn’t shake the illness. When he attempted to resume his usual routine, including regular swimming and biking, the symptoms returned with a vengeance. Persistent, intractable fatigue eventually forced him to make an appointment with his GP, who ordered blood tests. These were repeated a few months later. Both times the tests revealed nothing abnormal.

Duerden was subsequently referred to an immunologist, who thought he was suffering from some form of post-viral fatigue. Possibly, it was Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), but Duerden wasn’t presenting with the depression the immunologist typically saw with that condition. “Dr. Doolittle” (so named by the author for the fact that he would do so little) prescribed the two-pronged treatment approach usually reserved for patients with CFS: “graded exercise therapy”—that is, walking at least a half an hour every day—and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). In the end, Duerden didn’t qualify for cognitive behaviour therapy anyway because he wasn’t sufficiently depressed.

The author perhaps makes a little too much of being led to believe he had CFS when he actually had another condition—which was only discovered three years later. The fact is: it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in the long run if you’re told you have Fibromyalgia, Post-Viral Fatigue, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Myalgic Encephalopathy. All of these illnesses present with some combination of vague, non-specific symptoms, which may include: fatigue unrelieved by rest, muscle and joint aches, “brain fog”, headaches, and depression. Furthermore, they are all “wastebasket” diagnoses—conditions that doctors often can’t tell apart and that some don’t even believe in. There are no lab tests (e.g., blood work, urinalysis, or X-rays) to diagnose them, and there are no definitive clinical signs (e.g., a distinctive rash). Diagnosis is based on a patient’s report of symptoms. There are also no curative treatments (e.g., targeted drug therapies), though some relief of symptoms may be achieved with analgesics and anti-depressants. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome may now be acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, but heaven help those diagnosed with it: there is precious little that traditional western medicine can offer to treat it and similar conditions.

Nick Duerden found this out the hard way. As real and as debilitating as his fatigue was, he had fallen between the cracks in the NHS. An alternative-medicine skeptic whose default setting was to baulk at New-Age gurus and self-help guide books, he found himself deciding “to do something . . . radical,”— that is, “cross the Rubicon from one form of medicine which . . . [he] didn’t much understand but had unquestioning faith in, to another which seemed . . . the stuff of parody.” His book is a humorous account and catalogue of the modalities he tried.

With his wife’s encouragement, Duerden began with vitamin therapy, ingesting a huge number of pills each day and smearing a greasy (transdermal) mineral compound on his body because it was too gritty and unpleasant to drink. He also tried yoga and a form of mindfulness meditation, known as yoga nidra—in which a person performs certain mental exercises aimed at placing him in a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. Duerden enjoyed these yogic practices; the vitamins, not so much; however, he continued to experience debilitating fatigue. Walking to the corner store or going out to get his hair cut would leave him feeling depleted for days. He became housebound. His wife believed he might be agoraphobic. Mercifully, his brain was still firing and he could do much of his journalism work at home, conducting interviews with subjects over the phone rather than meeting them in person as he’d normally done. He acknowledges that he was luckier than many in the flexibility his work afforded. Even so, his protracted illness took an enormous toll on his family—his wife, in particular.

Eventually, Duerden’s search for a route to recovery led him outside the home and to the decision to document what was happening to him. One of his earliest experiences was with the London Optimum Health Centre, where he participated in a pricey 90-day program. At this apparently benign New-Age centre, “practitioners” linked chronic fatigue with defective thinking in a manner worrisomely similar to the followers of the questionable, even dangerous, doctrines of Christian Science. Participants in the program were taught to promptly notice negative thought patterns, yell “stop”, substitute negativity with affirmations, and then engage in “Emotional Freedom Techniques”, strange methodical rituals in which they were to repetitively tap various points on the body in order to unblock energy. It sounded to me as though this technique might only be encouraging a sufferer to substitute one pathology (fatigue) for another (obsessive compulsive disorder).

Emotional Freedom Techniques were only the beginning of the weirdness Duerden encountered. He is quick to inform the reader that for legal reasons, he is not suggesting that the man behind one treatment he looked into— Project Meditation’s “LifeFlow”, a kind of meditation muzak— is a “huckster”. However, he provides readers with all the information they need to draw that conclusion for themselves.

Duerden writes well and amusingly of the many, often wacky, alternative therapies he experimented with—from “Delta Isochronic Tones”, Ashok Gupta’s “Amygdala Retraining Technique”, and the brands of mindfulness meditation popularized by Oxford professor Mark Williams and former Buddhist monk, Andy Puddicombe (co-founder of the digital meditation platform Headspace) to the truly bizarre (and eyeball-rolling) practice of “Psych-K”, a form of online kinesiology (muscle testing) in which a practitioner uses a pendulum to communicate with a distant client’s super consciousness to guide the selection of just-right affirmations. Some of the interviews Duerden conducted with the founders and proponents of various techniques were enriching and enlightening. The conversations with the former NHS emergency physician and first chief medical officer at Headspace, Dr. David Cox, and psychoanalyst/social critic Susie Orbach, in particular, were standouts for me.

My only real criticism of Get Well Soon relates to the author’s decision to cover such a large number of alternative therapies. While I understand the desire to provide a sense of the range of approaches out there, I think Duerden’s book would have been better with fewer than a dozen examples, or at least with a reduction in the volume of encyclopedic detail about each treatment he investigated or undertook. Having said that, I found Get Well Soon to be an informative, humorous, and enjoyable book overall. Those with an interest in—or even a deep skepticism of—alternative medicine and New-Age practices, people battling Chronic Fatigue (and related syndromes), and readers of memoirs—illness narratives, in particular—may all find something to like here.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing me with an advanced review copy of this lively, intelligent book.

Because I myself am compromised by fibromyalgia and CFS, I was particularly eager to read this book .Had the author great insights into effective treatments? In the beginning he describes very well what living with severely debilitating fatigue is like - it's bone-crushing and soul piercing. And not just for the sufferer but also for his family. Nick Duerden devotes much of the book to the many and varied alternative treatments he undertook. Several of these were most interesting and seemed to have some positive effect. Overall however it seems like time and learning to accommodate helped him the most. I have however made note of the treatments that seemed most efficacious - in particular, I will try Vedic meditation as well as researching others such as Rob William's "Psych-K". I do not however subscribe to the theory of a fundamental psychological basis for FM/CFS. Perhaps he meant only for his particular case which turned out NOT to be CFS? In any case, there's much to like in this book and I recommend it.
Thank you to NetGalley,the publisher and the author for providing me with an arc in exchange for my honest review.

I was enthralled by this book. I read through the first 60% voraciously, thinking that the author was building up to some great revelation. The only revelation at the end, though, was that he came to grips and finally accepted his new reality....