Posted by bleauberry on November 22, 2018, at 11:22:39
In reply to I feel like I am brain damaged. Please read., posted by SLS on November 13, 2018, at 9:57:20
We're all brain damaged. The drugs didn't do that. The brain damage was already there. That's where our symptoms come from. Some of our meds have built-in side benefits such as anti-inflammation or anti-microbial. But they are also chemicals that change genes and brain receptors, some permanently, some temporarily.
Brain damage is a given. We all had that before our first dose of antidepressants.
So the idea now should be to reverse brain damage as much as we possibly can. With a shotgun approach, a blanket approach, because it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to identify in any of us the exact actual thing that is the problem. So we have to cover all the possibilities in a broad sweep, knowing that somewhere within that sweep, we address the actual problem, even if we don't know what it is, and we never will.
Scott I want to help put a visual into your mind of what the kind of treatment I am referring to looks like.
You are on 2 antibiotics, sometimes 3, maybe even a 4th one a few days a week, and they are chosen to hit extra-cellular, intra-cellular, and cystic forms, gram negative, gram positive, all at the same time. Your doctor switches things around with new ABX every other month or so. You cycle around through various ABX cocktails. They know how to do that. It's what they do as their expertise. They know that psychiatric symptoms of all kinds are likely to improve, even without good explanations as to why exactly.
Nobody will get better with just ABX. You are also taking digestive enzymes which help to digest food molecules before they get a chance to slip undigested through intestinal lining into the blood - the symptoms of 'leaky gut' are very common in American diets and in chronic illness. Brain fog and depression and allergies or sensitivities are common symptoms of that. Obviously if that is a cause of someone's depression, then no amount of psychiatric drugs is going to really help that. So we start with food and we eliminate common easy things known to depress. For that reason you eat gluten free and as much as you can afford, you eat organic. You aggressively avoid trace amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified foods.
You take a professional multivitamin. For example Life Extension brand. Where you get the important co-factors such as the methyls and the picolinates and the p5ps and etc - in chronic illness OTC vitamins are sometimes not absorbed or not able to be metabolized correctly, due to genetic snippets, so we need out nutrients to be pre-metabolized and ready to absorb.
Fish oil is pretty much given for everybody, healthy or not, symptoms or not. One to 4 capsules. I wouldn't look at it is therapeutic. Look at it as a base, part of the ground floor of a building.
Your inflammation supplements include Curcumin, Resveratrol derived from Polygonum Cupsidatum (Japanese Knotweed) not from grapes, Andrographis, and others. But just those 3 can do a very lot of good. They have many other mechanisms also, including anti-microbial of all kinds, heart protection, brain protection.
You take 2 or 3 adaptogens because they have wide spectrum multi-faceted mechanisms that help you with brain fog, mood, energy, endurance, and interest. They are not miracles but you definitely feel worse without them. Rhodiola rosea, Ashwagandha, and Cordyceps are the 3 I prefer and take. They are sort of like wide spectrum mixed agonist/antagonists at a bunch of different sites and genes, so they tend to blindly balance whatever is out of balance.
Heart health is under attack with chronic disease, stress and failed psychiatry. So you take Co-Q10 and hawthorn herb, both of which can help with all the other stuff as well. Multi-faceted, multi mechanisms.
Brain fog. Vinpocetine is made of the periwinkle plant and can help. The best thing though is to remove toxicity from the body to clear the brain. The above anti-inflammatories help to do that, but you take as-needed either activated charcoal caps or bentonite clay or both, to absorb all sorts of crap from your body and gut, especially the fat soluble stuff that keeps getting recirculated.
For detoxing you want to take N-Acetyl-Cysteine and you aren't taking it because a clinical study says it can help depression. That isn't it. You are taking it because it is the raw ingredient to make more of your own Glutathione, the body's main detox, and you are also taking Liposomal glutathione. People who can afford I.V. glutathione experience profound and immediate improvement. You might even consider doing that as a test just to see if toxic issues make that much of a different. (they do)
To stay well I take about 30 of these things. But a dozen or so is plenty good. It costs me about a couple hundred dollars a month. I have flare-ups now and then and still experience herxheimer reactions now and then, though both are sporadic and rare. The depression I always had is directly correlated to flare-ups and herx, which feel the same, and when I don't have those, I don't have depression either. When I get those, it brings me back to the sick psychiatric puppy I used to be.
You would no longer study scientific studies to make your substance choices, but rather, as a hobby. Because everything that is going to work for you is not provable. But then, neither is anything provable with Effexor or Paxil or anything else. It's all an educated guess, best shot, toss a coin, see what happens.
We just want to get the odds more in our favor. I for one believe it is impossible to do that with just psychiatric prescriptions or common herbs. Not possible. In my opinion.
So anyway, in a hypothetical world where Scott embarks on a new journey of healing, that is a real life example of what your daily consumption of healing substances would look like. You add those to whatever psych med helps at least somewhat, excluding the MAOIS since the drug-herb risk might be too much risk.
Check out Marty Ross, M.D. online. He has lots of useful information written in plain language. Don't call it lyme. The treatments are the same whether it is or not, and quite frankly, we will never know. If you were riddled with anxiety and not just depression I would be confident pointing a finger at Bartonella. If you had unexplained red spots on your body and you have night sweats a lot, I would be confident of Babesia. Based on your history I am fairly confident of Mycoplasma or a virus-based thing, both of which improve if you treat them as if they were lyme.
Just keep in mind that the primary symptom of any of these stealth infections or toxicities is psychiatric, and obviously treatment resistant because we are treating the wrong stuff.
I would be willing to bet $1000 you feel much better 2 years from now than you do now. But I would also be willing to up that bet to $10,000 that you fail to improve if you stay exclusively with psychiatric approaches. Very confident of what I say. It's just too bad that ideas which actually work are met with stiff resistance and pessimism. That is normal, unfortunately. I think you have the strength and the wisdom to bust out of that trap. Or else I wouldn't be spending so much time sharing so much info.
poster:bleauberry
thread:1102014
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20181024/msgs/1102154.html