Fatigue in M.S.

by DR. KURT WOELLER on DECEMBER 5, 2012


Fatigue as defined by Webster’s medical dictionary is as follows:

- weariness or exhaustion from labor, exertion, or stress, and the temporary loss of power to respond induced in a sensory receptor or motor end organ by continued stimulation.  Essentially, fatigue is the lack/loss of energy needed to maintain normal function – whether it is temporary or chronic. 

According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control approximately 25,000 million Americans suffer from severe fatigue (lasting longer than one month). We all experience fatigue from time to time, but the devastating problem of persistent fatigue is the inability to carry on normal daily activities essential for health, family and livelihood.

Fatigue is a significant problem in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). 

What are the reasons for fatigue in MS? 

Is fatigue in MS different than someone with classic Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or a person with another disease condition? 

What can be done to help with fatigue in MS?

The list of medical problems that can lead to fatigue is quite lengthy. When a patient presents to a physician with complaint of fatigue the doctor will look for clinical signs of recent illness such as a virus. They may ask questions about sleep habits, diet, issues related to potential depression, unexpected loss of weight, and other associated complaints, such as weakness, headaches, etc. The doctor will usually perform some blood testing for thyroid function (a good reason everyone with MS should have their thyroid assessed via Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, Free T3 and Free T4 levels), anemia (either iron and/or vitamin B12 and folate), metabolic panel looking at electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, and chloride, blood sugar (to rule out hypoglycemia or diabetes), and a complete blood count (to evaluate immune function).

However, in MS a person’s fatigue is often not caused by anemia or blood sugar problems (although it is important to check).  

The fatigue manifests at a much deeper level, in part from the cellular machinery called the mitochondria, as well as the associated immune dysfunction that defines the disease.

Mitochondria are our cells energy factories. They produce a tremendous amount of energy currency needed by the body, i.e. brain, heart, muscles to function properly. 

Mitochondria receive nutrients from our diet, as well as oxygen from the air we breathe to burn fuel (proteins and fats) for energy production. 

Deficits in certain nutrients like CoQ10 can leave the mitochondria vulnerable to malfunction. 

Certain nutrients have been shown to help some people with fatigue such as L-Carnitine (helps to transport fat into the cell as a fuel source – 500mg to 1000mg daily), CoQ10 (supports the inner workings of the mitochondria – 200mg to 300mg daily), NADH (necessary for mitochondria activity – 5mg to 10mg daily), and Ribose (needed for energy production – 5g to 10 g daily).

Another possible link for fatigue in MS has to do with a deficiency of cyclic AMP (cAMP). cAMP is a cellular messenger responsible for a variety of functions such as stimulating myelin production (protective coating around nerve cells that is damaged in MS) and helping to maintain the blood brain barrier (damaged in MS which can lead to brain inflammation). 

One brain structure responsible for cAMP production is the Pineal Gland. The pineal gland is best known for its role in sleep regulation through the production of melatonin. The pineal receives input from a chemical called Histamine 2 which has been found to be deficient in MS. Without adequate H2 people suffer many of the common problems seen in MS including fatigue, heat intolerance, digestive problems, symptoms of allergy, hormone imbalances, i.e. thyroid, poor sleep. 

A therapy called Prokarin has shown benefit for many individuals with MS. Prokarin positively influences the histamine 2 system in the body with improvements in symptoms such as fatigue and weakness.


There is much to discuss with respects to these important biochemical systems and how they related to MS. I will discuss Prokarin therapy and other related topics seen in MS in future writings.



Dr. Kurt N. Woeller About the author: Dr. Kurt N. Woeller, D.O. is the medical director for Sunrise Complementary Medical Center in California, as well as two online patient-physician access websites – www.AskTheDoctor-MS.com and www.AutismActionPlan.com. He has been a complementary and integrative medical specialist since 1998 helping individuals with chronic illness including Multiple Sclerosis, Autism, Chronic Fatigue, Autoimmune Disorders, etc. who are interested in integrative (traditional and natural medicine) medical options for their condition. Dr. Woeller is available for Q&A’s regarding natural and complementary medicine options for Multiple Sclerosis at AskTheDoctor-MS. You can also learn more about Dr. Woeller’s consultation services, books, websites, etc. at Dr.Woeller.com.



Source:  http://msrelief.com/2012/12/05/multiple-sclerosis-and-fatigue-why-are-you-so-tired/


All health and health-related information contained within this website are intended to be general in nature and does not reflect any and/or all treatment options. The web site is an educational tool and should not be used as a substitute for a visit with a health care professional.  

Cuteness; Cat swat dog's tongue

The Crack-Up Book

by
Charles Barber









The Crack-Up Book
Posted: 06/26/2013 9:50 am


"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."

That is how F. Scott Fitzgerald described his mental state in a series of essays called
The Crack-Up, published in 1936, a few years before he died.

The Crack-Up was Fitzgerald's description of his own experience with depression and alcoholism, and obliquely, his wife Zelda's bipolar disorder.

Yet nowhere in the essays are such psychiatric terms used. Instead, Fitzgerald uses metaphor and poetry. He writes that he "cracked like an old plate," and lived in a state of emotional bankruptcy in a world of "dangerous mist" and "villainous feeling." He sums up the last, lost decade of his life: there had been "too much anger and too many tears."

Thankfully Fitzgerald was writing before the publication of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manuals, the fifth edition of which, the DSM-5, was recently published. Had the DSMs existed, even a writer of Fitzgerald's stature would have been tempted to draw from symptom lists to describe his inner torment in The Crack-Up.

The DSMs have become victims of their own success. To be sure, the DSM-3, published in 1980, was a necessary step forward for the psychiatric world. Earlier manuals were steeped in unclear Freudianisms with little consistency in the language of even basic psychiatric diagnoses. Doctors, and perhaps more importantly, insurance companies, had no way to talk to one another. DSM-3 became quite unexpectedly a runaway success, a best seller. (The last version made $100 million for the APA.) But each successive edition seems to have gone haywire, adding over time, hundreds of new diagnoses. Which in turn has led to mass over-diagnosing and over-medicating.

A central problem is that the DSM's diagnoses are categorical, rather than dimensional. That is, to qualify for one of the 400 or so diagnoses in today's manual, one has to meet sharply drawn criteria. The DSMs have set up diagnosis as a light switch that is either on or off. But psychiatric conditions are not absolute and differ wildly in intensity from person to person. A dimensional perspective -- like that of a dimmer switch, as psychologist Simone Hoermann has put it -- more accurately reflects the realities of psychiatric suffering.

The result is a mass confusion between severe and persistent mental illness -- the truly mentally ill -- and the worried well. Millions of Americans are mistakenly walking around thinking they have a mental illness. One in ten of us in on antidepressants. Since the mass impact of the DSMs, psychiatry has been all off or on (mainly on), with no dimmers.

There are two ways out of this mess. The first is to ignore the DSM-5 entirely and wait until biological psychiatry can be used as a basis for a truly scientific diagnostic system. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, did as much recently when he said that NIMH would no longer use the DSM to guide research, favoring instead new categories based on neural circuits and cognitive functioning.

The second approach is to actually listen to patients as they tell their stories and describe what they are feeling. As William Osler, Canadian physician and a pioneer of modern medicine, said a century ago, "Listen to your patient. He is telling you the diagnosis." Besides, listening is good treatment. Research shows unequivocally that the more patients feel understood, the better their satisfaction with treatment. The better their satisfaction with care, the better their compliance and clinical outcomes.

I tell my students, if you want to learn about depression, don't read the DSM. Read The Crack-Up. If you want to understand grief, read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. If you want to know about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, read Wilfred Owen's poetry about World War I. This is how Owen described shell-shocked soldiers (he was one himself) in "Mental Cases":


These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished
... their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight becomes a bloodsmear; night becomes blood-black ...

Until the biology catches up, we would do well to heed the lessons of the literary and, yes, psychiatric experts -- Fitzgerald and Owen: no categories, all dimension.





Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-barber/the-crackup-book_b_3497782.html?utm_hp_ref=books&ir=Books

Stem-Cell Transplants Erase HIV In Two Men

Stem-Cell Transplants Erase HIV In Two Men

Two cancer patients in Boston no longer show any evidence of HIV infection, researchers announce.
By Rose Pastore

Posted 07.03.2013


Atomic Model of an HIV Capsid Courtesy of TCBG-UIUC

Two men with HIV seem to have been cleared of the virus after receiving stem-cell transplants to treat their lymphoma, scientists announced Wednesday at an International AIDS Society conference in Kuala Lumpur. One of the men has now been off of antiretroviral therapy for 15 weeks; the other stopped taking HIV-suppressing drugs seven weeks ago.

Doctors have been unable to detect HIV infection in the two men since they received the stem-cell therapy, though it is too early to be certain that the virus has completely disappeared from their bodies, according to Timothy Henrich, a physician and researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The cases of these two men differ from that of Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be cured of HIV, in a significant way: The so-called Berlin patient received a bone-marrow transplant to treat leukemia in 2007, using stem cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that makes people resistant to HIV, Reuters reports. The stem cells transplanted into the two Boston patients did not have that genetic mutation.

These patients, one of whom was infected as an infant and the other during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, are also unlike the baby girl who was recently cured of HIV. The infant in Mississippi was treated with antiretroviral therapy hours after her birth, and her cure is considered a "functional cure" because, while the virus is no longer replicating in her body, some tests revealed...

Read More:  http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/stem-cell-transplants-erase-hiv-two-men

Cancer - The Forbidden Cures

Massimo Mazzucco (born 20 July 1954 in Turin) is an Italian filmmaker who is known for producing documentary films such as The New American Century and Cancer -The Forbidden Cures. 

Mazzucco is also the editor of luogocomune.net, an Italian news site known especially for discussing conspiracy theories regarding the September 11 WTC attacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Mazzucco


Link: http://youtu.be/gWLrfNJICeM

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