About the author

About the author

I’m Michael Daniels, the creator of the GLA Axis framework and the subtype questionnaires hosted on this website.

Before becoming ill, I lived an active life — working a physically demanding job, spending time outdoors, and staying socially connected through hobbies and sport. Over time, ME/CFS progressively limited these activities in ways I did not initially understand.

Receiving a formal diagnosis was a turning point. It provided clarity after years of unexplained symptoms and medical uncertainty, and it fundamentally changed how I understood exertion, recovery, and illness progression. That shift — from self-blame and pushing through, to understanding physiological limits — is central to why this project exists.

My early thinking was strongly influenced by the work of Wirth & Scheibenbogen on post-exertional malaise (PEM), as well as by Patrick Ussher’s book Understanding ME/CFS and Strategies for Healing, which combines clear biological explanation with lived experience. That combination — rigorous models grounded in patient reality — directly shaped the development of the GLA concept.

As the framework evolved, I repeatedly arrived at ER–Golgi stress and recovery bottlenecks as a central constraint in ME/CFS. At that point, I encountered the work of Efthymios Kalafatis, whose systems-level approach to cellular stress provided a practical blueprint for organizing these ideas. By linking the vascular and exertion-based insights from Wirth & Scheibenbogen with Kalafatis’s ER-stress–focused modeling, I was able to resolve several open loops in the framework more quickly and coherently.

The GLA Axis is not a treatment protocol or a diagnostic tool. It is an interpretive, systems-level framework intended to explain why ME/CFS behaves the way it does — particularly why symptoms are delayed, systemic, and tightly linked to recovery failure rather than effort itself. The goal of this work is clarity: to replace confusion and blame with a biologically consistent explanation that matches lived experience, and that can continue to evolve as evidence improves.

For those interested in Efthymios Kalafatis’s work:
https://x.com/lifeanalytics
YouTube lecture

Purpose and scope

The goal of this website is to translate complex ME/CFS and Long COVID biology into a structured, testable framework that can guide pattern recognition, discussion, and future research.

If you notice an error, have a correction, or want to discuss research collaboration, you can reach me via the contact information linked below.