Dr. Michael Rosner of the University of Alabama, suffered from these symptoms. At the same time that he was operating on people with the neurosurgical condition called Chiari syndrome or spinal stenosis, a colleague recognized that the surgeries relieved symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. In Chiari and stenosis, there is a narrowing of the opening at the base of the skull or in the neck. This narrowing compresses on the lower part of the brain or the spinal cord. Chiari is a very rare structural condition where there are extra cerebellum crowding the outlet of the spinal cord from the skull.
Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal that produces compression of the neural elements.
This causes the same symptoms as Chiari, but is much more common. Hundreds of these surgeries enlarging the spinal canal highway have been successfully completed by Dr. Rosner , now working out of Park Ridge Hospital, in Hendersonville, N.C., and Dr. Dan Heffez, a neurosurgeon in the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch . No one yet knows the long-term results or which patients might benefit most. The results of these surgeries must be published and examined by others. This has not yet happened.