Posted by bleauberry on November 6, 2009, at 18:27:02
In reply to Underlying cause, posted by dapper on November 5, 2009, at 23:59:36
Yes, I have had luck in identifying the root cause(s)...usually several intermingled together...one causes another causes another, and depression is just one of them mixed in it all.
I doubt an MD who takes insurance is going to be helpful however. It will really take an Integrative MD...some take insurance and many don't. They are full fledged MDs, also trained in naturopathy and all kinds of different tests that mainstreet MDs are not trained to do. To save money, you could go to an Integrative MD for just one visit to specifically request the test kits you want to take.
The best a mainstreet internest might do is a complete thyroid panel...freeT3, T4, TSH, and if you're luck, thyroid antibodies. You want it all. That is a good start. Very doubtful they will find anything in their routine tests or even special tests.
I can direct you to some of the most common things to focus your detective work on. The positive side is that you will not need much money, and you will not need a doctor, to test for these things.
Candida or yeast/fungi. Long story. Highly underdiagnosed, often not even viewed as a legitimate thing. Difficult to test for...the best lab test is a urine test that shows the telltale unique chemicals excreted by yeast hiding within you somewhere. A mainstreet doctor won't know anything about it, an Integrative MD will. An easier test is to try a couple antiyeast herbs and see what happens. Caprylic Acid, Oil of Oregano, very high dose garlic (has to be the smelly kind, the odorless has weak anti-infection action), Grapefruit Seed Extract, Pau D'Arco. A common diagnosis goes like this...feel better than you've felt in a long time for a couple days (the organisms have been paralyzed and suppressed but are not yet dead). Then you become worse than you were at the beginning. This is the die-off effect called the Herxheimer reaction...massive toxins from the dying and dead, can't flush out that much fast enough, so you become toxic until the pathogen load is lowered. At this point, you just made a diagnosis. Cost, maybe $12 per herb. And, you also already found the correct agent the organism, whatever it is, is susceptible to. No guessing.
A Herx reaction can be quite severe. It can land you in bed with what feels like the flu or worse. The degree of the Herx is a fairly good yardstick of the degree of infection. Keep in mind, the herbs mentioned are foods that healthy people eat or drink because they like the taste or the health benefits...no side effects. If you get real nasty side effects, you know for sure something is up. You the detective just found a criminal in hiding.
Lyme disease or similar. Highly under-recognized, highly underdiagnosed, high rate of false lab tests. There are a handful of organisms that co-infect with the Lyme bacteria, and equally as bad, or sometimes infections with those without Lyme. Either way, psychiatrict symptoms resistant to treatment are a hallmark clue, and almost universally common with almost everyone in the infected group. Antibiotics to try would be Doxycyline, Amoxycycline, Clindamycin. Again, the same scenario as the yeast thing...feel better almost right away, then a lot worse. Diagnosis made.
Herbs for the bacterial infection challenge tests would include Olive Leaf Extract and the same herbs mentioned above for yeast. They are all broadly antifungal, antibacterial, and antiviral. Herbs specific for Lyme include Andrographis, Coptis, Teasel Root, Cat's Claw, Japanese Knotwood. They are also broadly antimicrobial and pro-immune and anti-inflammatory.
Worms, Babesia, protozoa. Usually co-infections with something else. The herb Artemisia wipes them out in short order, more powerful than meds. Safe, nontoxic herb.
Toxic burden. Most likely would be lead or mercury. Especially if you have or ever had silver fillings in your teeth. But also plastics, pesticides, herbicides, petroleum byproducts. The chelation drug DMSA is prescription, but also available at online cheap as a food supplement. You would need an Integrative MD for this because they have access to the labs. You would take low doses of DMSA every 4 hours for several days (25mg per dose), then a whopping 1200mg as a single dose...collect urine prior to that dose and then collect urine the 6 hours after that dose. The lab compares the two. The warmup days were to loosen stored metals, the big dose was to gather all that loosened stuff up at once. Even without the lab test, if you felt really good for a few days, or really bad for a few days, either way, you would automatically know that something is up. Because DMSA at those low doses has no side effects. You can also do the single large dose with no warmup doses. A longer term chelation can be done with an algae called Chlorella, as it picks up all kinds of toxins, whereas DMSA is most specific for just lead and mercury.
Cortisol. A huge player as a symphony conductor of neurotransmitters and receptor sensitivity. You would need a saliva cortisol sample taken 4 times throughout a 24 hour period. Again, an Integrative MD has access to the test kits for this. I am convinced almost everyone with longstanding psychiatrict problems has severely disturbed cortisol patterns...either a direct cause of the depression or a result of it...either way it will require fixing. That involves trials of Siberian Ginseng, Rhodiola Rosea, Licorice Root, Adrenal Cortex extracts, Tyrosine, and in some cases (like me) ultra low doses of physiological replacement hydrocortisone (2.5mg-20mg, far lower than problematic doses used for inflammation).
Food sensitivities. Gluten and dairy are the primary ones. Both are easy to test by eliminating them from your diet for 2 weeks. It's a rough two weeks without the foods you are accustomed to, but worth it for the test. Rule it in, rule it out, at least you'll know in two weeks without a doubt. If you feel a lot better at the end of those two weeks, and then reintroduce gluten or dairy (one at a time) and begin to feel worse, bingo, you just made a diagnosis.
In any and all of these situations, it is no wonder psych meds were a deadend road. They did absolutely nothing to manipulate the chemistry involved in the mood disorder, and in fact made it worse often times.
A complicating factor is that it is usually not one thing or another, but probably a cluster of things. For example with me, silver fillings put enough toxins in me to weaken an otherwise strong body so that I was now a fertile opportunistic home for infectious agents. People can have Lyme disease and yet no symptoms. It is the weakened bodies that show the symptoms. Whether metals, yeast, bacteria, whatever...the thing that almost always takes a beating is the adrenal glands, and thus very dysfunctional cortisol, and therefore very dysfunctional neurotransmitters and receptors.
For anyone with longstanding psych symptoms, I feel these things should be a part of their daily routine:
Olive Leaf and/or Oil of Oregano, to lower pathogen load in the body.
Chlorella, to lower toxin load in the body.
A modest daily multivitamin/mineral, preferably a food-based one rather than chemical one.
Anything that can strengthen the body's ability to fight back is good.
A filter on the kitchen sink faucet (Aquasana) to remove all debris, chlorine, metals, chemicals, fluoride, bacteria, everything). Pure water, and lots of it.
If inflammation is suspected (definite if any of the above challenge tests prove positive), then an anti-inflammatory diet is heavy on veggies, fruits, and grains, with only 20% proteins. Limit sugars and caffeine. This is just the opposite of what many dieters suggest...which is a high protein low carb diet, which worsens inflammation issues.
Healing is longterm...months to a couple years. The rewards however can be quite dramatic and last the rest of your life. That is the difference between this type of healing and meds. True healing restores and endures. People who have truly been bedridden and waiting for death have been born again feeling 20 years younger and gone back to work and school with minimal symptoms, sometimes none. (permanent organic damage may have occured sometimes)
Yeast, bacteria, toxins, adrenals, foods...these are the primary areas for you to become an expert detective, because these are the areas where most people like you and me find they have severe hidden problems all along and never knew it. That's why the psych meds didn't work well. You can test all of these yourself with very little money, and in doing so will learn more about yourself than 50 years of internests will be able to tell you.
There are other causes of depression, but the ones I mentioned I am fairly confident cover about 90% of the spectrum.
In your trials, it would not hurt to go back to basics and try things like low dose tyrosine and/or low dose 5htp. I'm talking 1/10th the doses on the bottle, taken for at least a month, and increasing if no effect or hint of good effect, abandoning if bad effect. The primary cause of failure with these neurotransmitter makers is too much too fast.
So, of everything I have said in this post, how do we know these things are actually related to depression? We know this because there are literally thousands of personal accounts on the web from real people like you and me, with heartfelt stories that would make you cry. And because a small minority of doctors who specialize in this stuff have patients travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see them when word of mouth spreads that they are actually healing people back to life from hopeless situations. In all of these cases, it is one of the above issues that was at play. I am just one of tens of thousands.
Without much explanation or science, toxins clog receptors, destroy receptors, create enzyme roadblocks in manufacturing or neurotransmitters, disrupt hormones, disrupt immune system. No wonder then, the depression that results. No wonder a reuptake inhibitor was impotent.
Microbials secrete very powerful chemicals in their waste. These chemicals have a high affinity for our brain receptors, as well as corrupting our own serotonin and dopamine. No wonder the meds didn't work...we were increasing amounts of polluted neurotransmitters. The microbes are also devastating on the immune system and many biochemical functions. Depression is almost unavoidable with all this hidden unsuspected assault going on.
When a psychiatric med history is long, tortured, and unfruitful, that itself is a very powerful clue not to be ignored. It should not be viewed as a mystery or a disappointment. It is telling us something powerful and very loudly so...one of the above things I mentioned.
poster:bleauberry
thread:924669
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20091029/msgs/924775.html