Nutrition and Multiple Sclerosis

A number of people who come to my connective tissue disorder site also have symptoms of multiple sclerosis. A few years ago one of my neighbors was telling me about her MS symptoms, and there seemed to be a lot of overlap with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

So I did some research on Pubmed and found many nutritional deficiencies linked to MS, and interestingly many of the symptoms of MS are also linked to nutritional deficiencies. It's unfortunate that these studies are not made widely available to the general public. Researchers seem to want to focus on a single cause for MS like there is for chicken pox, but the evidence indicates that MS isn't caused by a virus at all. Malabsorption, low body weight and nutritional deficiencies are a common and pervasive theme in much of the MS research.

Magnesium deficiency seems to be common in MS as well as many symptoms of EDS, so that might explain some of the overlaps.

One really interesting point about MS is that is seems to be mutually exclusive with gout. Since we know the diet people need to have to avoid gout (one low in uric acid forming foods) then it would be logical to consider that a diet high in uric acid forming foods would be good for MS.

Tics, Tourettes Syndrome, and Magnesium Deficiency

I just added a new page to my Connective Tissue Disorder site on tics. My sons have mentioned kids at school with odd tics, eye blinking and assorted involuntary movements. So it prompted me to write about my own experiences with one of my children and facial tics. For a while, when one of my sons was around four years old, he had facial tics and weird eye blinking that was getting worse and worse. I was very worried he was going to end up diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome. I ended up finding out that tics could be caused by a magnesium deficiency. So we changed his diet to get more magnesium and within a few days he was fine. I see so many people these days with facial tics and other involuntary movements and I do wonder if some of them might also be helped my some relatively simple diet changes. In my sons case I think one of the main culprits was that I thought I was helping my kids by giving them multivitamins and fortified foods. However, it turns out that many fortified foods do not contain magnesium, and to make matters worse, they often contain magnesium antagonists. So add that kind of a diet to a family history of issues with magnesium deficiency and the diet I thought was healthy for my kids was actually causing them more harm than good.

Sham Acupuncture as Helpful as Real Acupuncture for Migraines

In my experience, acupuncture didn't help any of my headhache or other pain problems at all. As such, I found the above link interesting. In my main web site I made a list of alternative treatments I found helpful for all of my connective tissue disorder issues, including headaches.

The helpful treatments included diet changes, yoga, and Ayurvedic medicine. Treatments I personally did not find helpful for either myself or my family included homeopathy and acupuncture.

Homeopathy No Better Than Placebo - Study

A recent paper published in the Lancet cliams that homeopathy works no better than placebos at treating illness. I would tend to agree with those conclusions. I've never been a fan of homeopathy so I can't say I was sorry to see these headlines today. I find it unfortunate that homeopathy gets thrown along with proven therapies such as nutrition and exercise when people talk about alternative health treatments. For more information on my experience, see my web site pages page on my experience with homeopathy.

I took my some to a homeopathic doctor out of sheer desperation one time when he had some unusual health issues our regular and even holistic doctors could not figure out. I spent a signifivant amount of time and money on the appointment and I thought it was a complete waste. The "remedy" never helped one bit.

Dangers of Teflon

"Scientific studies have found that Teflon's key chemical, linked to cancer and organ damage in laboratory animals, is in the blood of almost all Americans."

It is interesting to note that most alternative health experts have been recommending people avoid cooking with Teflon for years. At our house we try to use only stainless steal or glass for cooking foods.

Never Give Up on Your Health

I had an appointment at Kaiser today for some small skin imperfections I wanted checked out. We only switched to Kaiser in the past few years after my health had improved from adopting many of the diet and exercise changes outlined in my www.ctds.info site. My Kaiser doctor didn't know me at the time I was having severe bleeding issues, fibromyalgia, TMJ and many of the other issues listed in my connective tissue disorder site. She commented today at my appointment on how she rarely saw me and how few Kaiser resources I used compared to most of her other patients. It was pretty cool hearing that.

A few years ago I was going from specialist to specialist for all of my different health issues to hope to get a diagnosis, let alone a cure for everything that was wrong with me. There was actually a time when I was considering using a wheel chair. My husband and I also had been househ unting for a one story home because I was having trouble going up and down stairs in our two story house.

Well, after many hours of reseaching my health issues, a lot of diet changes and many hours of yoga, today I'm in pretty good shape. We ended up staying in the same house. Last year I bought an expensive mountain bike instead of a wheel chair.

So if you have unusual problems, even a supposedly incurable disorder like me, my advice is to never give up trying different doctors and searching for answers on your own. If I had not done my own health research, I might be in that wheel chair today instead of back on a bike.

Pfizer Suspends Bextra, Agrees to Warning on Celebrex - another drug solution bites the dust. Or as the famous quotes goes, "Some remedies are worse than the disease." ~ Publilius Syrus

Morgellons

I read an article in the paper the other day about a disorder called Morgellons and it just blew me away. My son and I had many of the same symptoms, though nothing as extreme. The part I found especially interesting was that people with the disorder all had weird fibers growing out of lesions on their bodies, yet most of them were being diagnosed with "delusional parasitis (DP)". It's the doctor's that are delusional in this case, and probably most others cases of DP, too. The doctors are at a loss to explain or treat the patients symptoms so they take a "the patient must be crazy approach". It does make me wonder about the logic skills of the medical profession as a whole. How can lesions in thousands of people, all complaining of the same symptoms, all with strange fibers growing out of their bodies, possibly attributed to delusion?

I have medical text books from the early 1900s and medical textbooks from recent times and there is very little overlap. Most of the diseases we have identified today did not have names or diagnostic criteria in the early 1900s. What are the odds that there will be many more diseases and infections in medical texts of a hundred years from now? Are all of the people who have disorders that are not in the current medical texts being diagnosed today as delusional? I worry that might be true. In the old medical books many disorders were attributed to "female hysteria"--conditons that would more likely be diagnosed as epilepsy today.