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Introduction to the Cheney Institute, PLLC and its new website.

The Cheney Institute is the next evolution of The Cheney Clinic, PA which was retired in December, 2015 after 25 years of highly successful operation so that Dr. Cheney could pursue various research interests, book writing, phone and on-line consults and more limited face-to-face patient care. The Cheney Clinic served over 8,000 patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) from 48 states and 27 foreign countries during its 25 years of operation with a clinic specialty in the echocardiographic findings common to CFS cases since 2005.

Paul R. Cheney MD, PhD

For over thirty years, Dr. Cheney has been a pioneering clinical researcher in the field of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He has published almost forty articles in peer reviewed medical journals or poster presentations and lectured around the world on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). He is an internationally recognized authority on the subject of CFS. Dr. Cheney holds a PhD in Physics from Duke University in Durham, NC and is a graduate (MD) of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA where he also completed his internal medicine residency and is Board Certified.
While practicing on the north shore of Lake Tahoe in Incline Village, NV in 1985, Dr Cheney helped lead a landmark, multi-institution research effort to study a localized outbreak of what would eventually be known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome . Since 1990, Dr. Cheney headed the Cheney Clinic, PA, located primarily in Asheville, NC from 2001 through 2015. The Cheney Clinic has had over 20,000 CFS patient contacts and evaluated over 8,000 patients with CFS from 48 states and 27 foreign countries and saw only CFS patients. Dr. Cheney presently runs a consultation practice on CFS from the newly created Cheney Institute, PLLC as of 2016 and also located in Asheville, NC.

The primary focus of the Cheney Institute, PLLC and its new website is to document and discuss our current understanding of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) with its increasingly recognized core problem at the level of the energy generation system of the cell known as the mitochondria. Indeed, mitochondrial dysfunction is the primary underlying cause of the unique echocardiographic features seen in CFS as well as many cardiovascular and orthostatic symptoms of CFS. Whether mitochondrial dysfunction is the cause of CFS or another effect of a yet deeper problem will be explored on this website. The Cheney Institute will also continue to engage in various research projects with other investigators with an increasing focus on genetic and metabolic data analysis using next generation genomics and next generation metabolomics. One analysis looks at gene insertions and deletions as well as gene adducts tied to cellular DNA and the other analysis looks at how CFS metabolism is expressed uniquely in each individual and perturbed by unique environmental insults (infections, toxins and physical as well as emotional stressors) that alter both gene expression and tertiary protein structures.