Posted by BarbaraCat on September 26, 2003, at 23:18:32
In reply to Saint Barbara, one more thing.... » BarbaraCat, posted by nmk on September 26, 2003, at 12:28:40
Thanks for the Saint, but I really Ain't! But thanks for the canonization anyway. I've been hearing alot lately about folic acid being good for depression which is a very good thing. I took it a few years back and think it helped but it's hard to know when you're taking a boatload of meds anyway. There's been some good press about it lately and mainstream medicine seems are becoming savvy to it. 2M is a hefty dose. I've only taken 1M at a time. I was thinking of trying it again, and will go with the 2M dose this time, so thanks... Fish oil is helping both me and my hub so it's worth giving a try. But you've gotta take alot.
Your test results sure indicate that you've got some metabolic funk that will most definitely affect your mood. Borderline low thyroid, especially. You've got to get that TSH no higher than 2.0 and some say 1.0. Of course, with bipolars (if indeed that's your issue - the thyroid can CAUSE bipolar symptoms) it's a razor's edge. Too low a TSH can cause hyperthyroid symptoms and can switch on hypomania. Did your doc test for thyroid antibodies to rule out Hashimoto's? Some research recently has theorized that this autoimmune thyroid disorder pulses thyroid up and down and can mimic bipolar symptoms. Hopefully your doc gave you thyroid hormone to correct your 'borderline' status and hopefully it contains some T3 along with the standard T4 that most doctors feel is adequte. It might be for some, but research is showing that for mood challenged folks, we need T3 too.
Even with your tests showing that you have some significant deficiencies, the challenge is to get the right treatment and to have patience while it works. You should feel the effects of B12 right away, but thyroid takes longer as do any of the hormones. But you say 6 months? You should be feeling a whole lot better by now. Have you been retested? Progesterone does make some women feel worse. It's what shoots up right before your period and causes PMS if other things are out of whack. But if you're deficient, that's got to be balanced, because low progesterone causes anxiety. That was also my case and I'm feeling better since increasing it. It may not only be progesterone, but something underlying that is causing the progesterone and other things to be out of whack. Sometimes that underlying factor is low thyroid. The thyroid has to be in sync for any of the other hormones to do their job. But then, one asks, what's causing the low thyroid? Well, it's probably because somewhere along the way our hypothalamus/pituitary got bonked, usually through stress, and stress can be psychological as well as environmental, like pesticides, chlorides.
The hypothalamus pretty much controls the thyroid and indirectly the sex hormones and the whole hormonal show. If it's bonked and keeps getting bonked through stress (stress hormones are toxic to this brain stucture) you're going to have ongoing and increasingly worsening problems. Sometimes you can 'heal' it by providing the right external boosts to give it a chance to reset it's feedback loop signalling function. This might be psych meds that reduce stress reactions while the overall brain and body recuperates. Give the body the right hormones and you take stress off the organs which get totally confused when they're not getting the proper signals from the hypothalamus. Thyroid is critical for all this to work. It controls metabolism, homeostasis - a cellular sparkplug, but also the sex hormones which are crucial for the brain hormones to work - little known fact. Thyroid influences estrogen production and estrogen is needed by the brain to prime certain receptors, serotonin's among others. It's all such an interconnected loop. Notice how meds keep losing their effectiveness, like ooops, need a bigger bandaid here. One small hiccup and eventually the whole system gets thrown off and the weakest link is going to break first. For many of us, that weakest link is our brain health. One begins to see that you can't just hit one pathway with meds, physical or mental, and expect a lasting change.
You ask if my naturopath works like your doc. Hard to say, but she does work very differently than most of the other docs I've ever gone to. She uses saliva testing primarily (ZRT Labs in Portland, OR) for hormone testing and standard lab work for the rest. She monitors progress using tests so she's not shooting in the dark and she goes slowly, building up one system and then adding another with the philosophy that a weakened system can't handle too much too quickly. She's an incredible diagnostician and based on symptoms knows which tests to order first, and then goes slowly from there. She feels that most health and mood disorders are hormone related but so much can contribute to that. She does alot of testing for heavy metals. A friend's test came back extremely high for mercury toxicity and sure enough, all the symptoms of mercury toxicity were what she was experiencing. She is very depressed also, but differently than me, and her hormonal profile was different than mine.
I had significant hormonal imbalances but I wasn't getting better even though I'd had prior hormone therapy (good enough but not the sufficient) and nothing was holding. She suspected that I had low growth hormone because I have fibromyalgia and in her experience, that's pretty typical. Sure enough, the test came back with a very very low IGF-1 level indicating hardly ANY human growth hormone. Now, HGH is the major hormone produced by the pituitary in the brain and it's a critical player in this whole hypothalamus/pituitary loop system. So even though I was taking individual hormones, nothing was lasting for long because the underlying deficiency wasn't getting addressed. So, we tracked an underlying cause to this human growth hormone deficiency which at this point looks like it's the common denominator in this whole imbalance. I'm now injecting myself every morning with HGH which is very expensive and I sure hope it works. It's slow acting, 6 months or more, but it will cascade down to create overall hormonal health. But until then, I'm feeling much better already since I'm now using a better balance of hormones and switched from Synthroid to a natural form of thyroid hormone with T3. I have also increased lamictal and I think it's had a positive effect on my mood. My energy and general health is so much better that my mood is better and vice versa. I may be on psych meds forever, but that's OK because I'm expecting them to work so much more effectively. Perhaps one day I'll be able to manufacture the necessary neurochemicals on my own, but I bless those pills anyway!
I definitely think that addressing underlying imbalances was necessary in my case. This may not be so with everyone and many times simply removing chronic stress through taking the right psych-meds is enough to allow the body to regain homeostasis, but whatever method, the body/mind have to come to some kind of agreement about stress. For me, my stress was extreme, started very young since my father was a very violent man, and has been going on for over 40 years. In my case, fibromyalgia seems to be a last-ditch attempt by my body to just say no to stress, much like a circuit breaker. It's brought me to my knees, can't work in my hellish high tech field anymore and am now on disability. It shuts me down completely for weeks at a time in intense pain, fatigue, insomnia. I rarely go out on the town anymore and have to call it a night by 11:00 no matter what I'm doing or where I am. And I bless it's nasty and painful little heart otherwise I would've pushed myself into the ground. I've always had mood disorders, but fibro is a whole other thing, a whole body and mind pain and an outcome of unrelenting stress. Fibro, like shit, happens.
So I say all this rambling to illustrate that we all have different chemistries and we all have to sleuth out what's going on under the obvious surface and it has to be a slow process because things like hormones take at least a year to balance IF you're getting the proper treatment. You also need to be working pretty closely with someone, as in teamwork, and not expect that to see someone a few times and getting some meds is going to do the trick. My experience with seeing well over 100 health practitioners is that you have to do your own homework all throughout your treatment. Also, with the many holistically oriented MDs I've seen, few were really helpful, and few really knew the delicate interplay of the hormonal systems. And for God's sake, stay away from Endocrinologists unless he/she has first been canonized a Saint!
For you, it may be something else entirely, but the fact that you've got test results that show imbalances is very significant. It may not be the entire answer, but you've got to at least get these imbalances in order and anything else that crops up because of your current dysfunctions. Otherwise, it's all bandaids. - BCat
poster:BarbaraCat
thread:261445
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030923/msgs/263654.html