Sam: I have tackled "chronic fatique" issues for many years. Two things suggest themselves right off. Many doctors consider (1) fibromyalgia and (2) dental filling damage either nonexistent or extremely rare. If you haven't check these possibility out in your own case, I would recommend you do so with a doctor who admits their existence. Fibromyalgia (muscle tenderness/pain/weakness) has no cure at present but can now be clearly diagnosed and identified; its presence is a strong indicator of chronic fatigue syndrome and can be lived with and minimized by a sensible patient and helpful medical advisor. As for dental problems, your whole history would have to be taken into account to know if there was even any reason to suspect this. If you've ever had (1) mouth injuries; (2) infections/abscesses following dental work (or any other kind of illness occurring shortly after specific dental work; (3) any systemic condition like rheumatic fever or lupus or MS, etc., you should find a dentist who understands the risk of metals toxicity to a body that is exposed to the mercury and/or copper, nickel and other metals in amalgam and who is willing to test you for damage. It would help to get a hair analysis test (measuring levels of trace minerals in your hair) because it is an excellent barometer of metabolic balance in your body. However, be warned that many doctors don't know how to use the resulting lab report, and tend to dismiss the analysis even if it comes back with noticeable imbalances. (In my case, 20 of 21 trace levels in my body were severely out of balance. Salt was the only mineral in balance. Calcium, for instance, was supposed to be something like 900 parts per million; mine went off the testing laboratory's scale at 2,999 ppm, so they couldn't even measure how high the concentration was. Several other metals showed up nearly that high or contrastingly low. If you pursue the dental amalgam possibilities, you should have the dentist test the level of electrical current being put out by your fillings. Many medical doctors consider this ridiculous; I can tell you that after having my first crown "installed," I began experiencing severe symptoms throughout my body, including excruciating pain for months, first in my lower back and then in my upper shoulder; acrid, flooding saliva output, jaw and ear infections and chronic sinusitus and much more. When my dentist finally decided to come on board and begin testing for metals toxicity, he found that every filled tooth (all but four of mine had silver fillings) was putting out negative electrical current that pegged off his test meter, while the tooth which had the gold crown in it was putting out positive electrical current, equally off the meter. Final note: there are many people out there who want to take advantage of you by scaring you into thinking you MUST have this or that syndrome. That is why most doctors pooh-pooh chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and dental amalgam toxicity as the product of hypochrondria. For those of us who go through this every day, hypochrondria has nothing to do with it. It is possible to be under siege from something that compromises the immune, circulation, digestive and other systems without knowing quite what is attacking you. May I urge you to spend some quality time on the internet, preferably the actual medical libraries of current articles, NOT so much the chat rooms like this one. Many medical articles, though some are too technical, are perfectly readable by the average sufferer and can help you define what the medical community believes is going on. You can then judge for yourself. The two most important pieces of advice I can give you are these: (1) NEVER define yourself as a sick person. Your body may be ill, even very ill, or "besieged" or "diseased," or whatever. But you don't have to be a sick PERSON unless you choose to be. You can't catch a sick attitude, and your attitudes can stay 100% healthy if you choose to see your life that way. I would have been dead years ago if I hadn't learned that lesson early on. The second piece of advice is to NEVER give up believing that you can find a doctor and/or dentist, if that proves relevant, to help you. They are few and far between right now, but more and more people, including medical professionals, are slowly discovering that people who exhibit chronic fatigue symptoms are not all cranks and emotional babies. I hope this diatribe has been of help to you. Best of luck.