Category Archives: seizures

Breast Cancer Survivor Takes on the Issues

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Carole Baggerly had her own experience with breast cancer. She then started to research the reason why. Her discovery; scientists have expressed the understanding that breast cancer is a deficiency disease. That is over her life time, her intake of vitamin D was not adequate. She was so upset and concerned about the issues that she started GrassrootsHealth. This is a consortium of more than forty scientists and doctors that are experts in vitamin D and nutrition. She discovered that it was not only breast cancer, but a host of chronic illness related to deficiencies. Take the time and watch her explain the issues in the first thirty minutes of this video presentation.  Carole Baggerly and Dr. Heaney, September, 2012  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

If you are concerned about the health of your children, yourself, your parents, the next hour is Dr. Heaney who has contributed significantly to the understanding of vitamin D. He talks about the longevity issues and decline with chronic disease because of nutritional deficiencies. There are many diseases that have now been linked to deficiencies that number into the hundreds. This is particularly pointed to vitamin D deficiency.

This discussion is fairly non-technical and is understandable by the average person. Dr. Heaney expresses the understanding that “things go better with vitamin D”. That is that vitamin D deficiency may not be the cause of a disease like TB, but not having enough vitamin D will prevent your body from properly healing. However, this understanding falls into the logic of the chicken versus the egg. In other words, if you had enough vitamin D would you have gotten TB in the first place? Dr. Heaney discusses everything from diabetes, heart disease, MS, pregnancy, and cancer to infectious diseases like TB. I give the video presentation six stars out of a five star rating system for understanding of chronic disease and the effect of vitamin D.  Presentation to Direct-MS Canada.

Your take away from this, is you, your friends, and your family should not suffer from vitamin D deficiency.   Standards within the medical industry have long been 20 ng/ml to 100 ng/ml.   There have not been any cases of toxicity below 200 ng/ml or 500 nmol/l.  There does not appear to be any downside at this level of vitamin D.  Some laboratories have decreased the upper number, 100 ng/ml, to whatever they are measuring the population. Best health for you can be reached with a vitamin D serum level, 25(OH)D between 40 ng/ml to 80 ng/ml; note this is still within the normal range as defined by medicine. It is not how much you take; it is where you maintain your serum level. Everyone responds differently to their intake from all sources of vitamin D. The only way to know is to test.  Dr. Heaney says to maintain a level above 40ng/ml will require an intake from all sources of 5000 IU or more of vitamin D3 per day.

Please note this presentation is in Canada. The measurements used are in nanamoles per liter or nmol/l. To convert ng/ml to nmol/l multiply ng/ml by 2.5. So the normal range of 20 to 100 ng/ml is 50 to 250 nmol/l. Get your serum level tested to give your body a chance to thrive. If you choose to do it through GrassrootsHealth, you become part of the study that will help to advance health in the population. – Pandemic Survivor

Test by GrassrootsHealth: banner_ad_long5company postingVideo of how to do the test:  bscvideothumbnailv3web

Managing Pain with Nutrients

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Pain management for the central nervous system, CNS, (also generalized musculoskeletal pain) has implications that are much further reaching than just making you feel better.  Of course making you fell better and getting you to relax is really all that most care about when their day is so consumed with excruciating pain.  Pain that reaches right through the center line of your body, grabs your heart in its hands, and squeezes until your eye balls pop out.  Too descriptive for you, then maybe you should realize there are pain levels beyond what you are currently suffering.  When pain becomes too great, your body just starts to shut down in what is commonly known as shock.  The action of an upset in the CNS can cause many types of issues as the general signaling for body functions are interrupted.  The long term effects of chronic severe pain can cause the brain to shrink.  The rate of shrinkage has been estimated for one year of chronic severe pain to be equivalent to fifteen to twenty years of aging.  An upset in the CNS can do great harm to you, so the course of action is to slow the immediate pain response and then address the cause.  You body’s natural response to slow pain to keep you from doing damage to yourself is shock, which has its own implications.

What gives me the right to discuss pain as an expert?  I have suffered pain since 1978 or before many of you were born.  After realizing that my doctor was just trying to patronize me because he thought that I was a whiner, I begin to research the causes and results of pain.  Know that on my pain scale of zero to ten, that the debilitating pain of a ruptured appendix is a four.  My spinal cord being seventy-five percent compressed in the lumbar area is now a ten.  My research and the use of many different types of pain amelioraters has lead me to come to the conclusion that pain meds can be worse for your body than the pain when used long term.  When used short term to stop your body from ‘seizing’ then they are a blessing.  Notice that I used the word seizure because that’s what happens when the action potential along the CNS becomes out of control.

As an aside, in a discussion with a retired pharmaceutical researcher, he said that the way that they caused rats to seize so that they could test seizure meds was to withhold vitamin D.

I will forgo the long discussion of prescription pain meds and otc pain meds to talk about natural pain nutrients that were designed by nature to affect the way you respond to pain.  Know that there are certain things in your body that become deplete that cause the pain response to be worse.  When I say pain response, I am talking about not only the initiating pain, but also the ‘electrical disturbance’ that occurs along your nerve pathways after the fact.  Imagine a series of electrical circuits that lost their insulation or the controls have failed and exactly the same thing happens in your CNS.  Prescription meds either slow the response of release of neurotransmitters at the nerve junction to interrupt communication or cause a different type of neurotransmitter to be released to create euphoria like the endorphin mimics, opioids.  A word of caution should be given here about pain meds that are used for reducing the action of voltage gated calcium channels.  This includes calcium channel blockers that are used to treat high blood pressure as well as heart disease.  The side effects of these drugs can be very damaging and for that reason you should only used these drugs short term until you determine which nutrient deficiency is making you ill.  This includes the seizure meds gabalin and pregabalin, that are now being used for pain control.  They are nothing more than amino acids that affect the voltage calcium gate.

All of these calcium channel blockers are really just mimics of the vital amino acid, l-arginine.  L-arginine works by releasing nitric oxide which allows the blood vessels to relax and reduce blood pressure and give you a healthy heart.  High blood pressure and heart disease; be sure you are getting enough l-arginine.

In a previous post, we discussed action potential or how signals travel along neural cells that compose the nervous system. The last action in the action potential is the opening of the calcium channel to cause the neurotransmitter to be released at the junction of the synapse. The calcium channel is in essence the key to cellular biological functions.  I remember reading this in Scientific American in the late seventies and thought the author had lost his mind.  He was in fact saying that calcium acts more like a hormone for cellular action than it does a mineral to maintain electrical stability. A natural calcium channel blocker is magnesium.  I believe this works by how the energy is supplied to operate the protein that comprises the calcium gate through ATP.  So my question to you; why are you taking a calcium channel blocker when most likely all you have is a huge magnesium deficiency.  There is no clinical test to determine if your cells are replete in the vital nutrient.  It takes six months to a year to become replete with magnesium when your intake is 3.5 to 4.5 milligrams per pound of body weight per day.  This is about three times what we find in our normal diet.  Magnesium works on the calcium channel of cells that make sure there is enough stored calcium in the cell. http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/calcium_blockers.htm   In pain, high blood pressure, or heart disease, take adequate amounts of magnesium per day.

As you need energy, there is a need to be sure the ‘engines’ that generate energy requirements of the cells are healthy.  Mitochondrial bodies are these engines that carry on the ATP/ADP cycle for energy transfer.  This is the energy that operates all of the ion gates in cells and along neural cell axons for the sodium/potassium gates.  Magnesium and vitamin D3 are the things that keep the mitochondrial functions adequate.  There is also the need for elimination of waste as in any process there is intake/action/product and waste removal.  Sulfur is the body’s natural compound for removing waste.  Organic compounds that need to be removed from cells forms an ester with sulfur.  This is water soluble so the waste moves out of the cell and out of your body. In pain, itching, low energy, and have general malaise, then be sure you are getting an adequate amount of vitamin D3, magnesium, potassium, and sulfur.

I will relate this story by my daughter a pharmacist at a local university hospital.  She had a patient that required so much pain medicine to control the pain that the patient was not lucid. After giving the patient significant amounts of vitamin D, she was able to reduce the patient’s pain meds to less than half.  The patient was then able to function normally. Here is a great review of vitamin D3 and pain for the clinician.  Vitamin D for Pain  http://pain-topics.org/clinical_concepts/vitamind.php   CAUTION USE D3 ONLY!  NO D2!

Drugs are nothing more than mimics of natural substances or replacements for nutritional deficiencies.  Natural substances can be used much more safely because there are fewer side effects.  But the root cause of pain, disease, and death is nutritional and spiritual deficiency.  – Pandemic Survivor

Seizures and Electrolytes

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From the Epilepsy Foundation we find that a seizure is: “A seizure is a massive disruption of electrical communication between neurons in the brain—.“  You can find this at their web site and this page defines a seizure and a seizure threshold.

As someone that is not trained in biology or medicine it seems that a seizure occurs when the ‘break-over voltage’ exceeds the resistance of the circuit.  This is how a semiconductor works as well which starts conduction when the ‘saturation voltage’ is reached.  So let’s think about how signals travel down neural pathways.  It would seem that they travel through a series of gates that control the ‘saturation’ levels of sodium and potassium along the pathway.  The ‘action potential’ varies along the axon causing the sodium gates to open and allow sodium into the axon and then the potassium gate opens and allows potassium to rush out so that through this mechanism the ‘signal’ travels along the axon.  When the signal reaches the synapse then neural transmitters are released to carry the signal to the next neuron through its dendrites.

The cell and axon returns to a stable voltage ‘without’ transmitting when the sodium potassium pumps through its action causes the sodium to be forced outside the axon and potassium to be brought into the axon thus reversing the signal or action potential.  The cell body is somewhat more complicated but know that calcium gates are somewhat controlled by the concentration of magnesium.

It is interesting that the article immediately goes to neural transmitters like GABA and ACH and how too much of these will cause the cells to be over stimulated and continue to fire.  This is somewhat different in how engineers would look at a semiconductor and what causes it to fire.  Yes we look at the voltage of the base to control whether the semiconductor is on or off.  However, we control what voltage causes the semiconductor to turn on/off by the amount of ‘doping’ or mineral/metal that is placed in the semiconductor during manufacture.  The equivalent of this in the body of the cell and the axon is how the gates of the cell are working to allow conductive ions in and out and if there is adequate amounts of these electrolytes available.

Ions that are associated with this conduction are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium.  So it would just seem that a proper diet is extremely critical for a stable environment of electrical conduction in the cell.  That is you need to eat and absorb enough of these minerals so that proper electrical potentials are maintain.

Before you consider changing your diet and taking supplements be sure that you consult with your physician to get him to approve your changes.  If he is resistant please suggest that he read the articles that I am suggesting for you.

Also as vitamin D is extremely important to maintain a healthy endocrine system, proper levels of this vital nutrient should be maintained.  The newer understanding is each cell makes its own steroid form of vitamin D from the storage form of vitamin D.  The cell does not have to get it through the serum level of the steroid as converted in the kidneys.  So does vitamin D affect the threshold levels for seizures?  Here is a study that was done in 1974 that says that there is an association:  “Anticonvulsant Action” of Vitamin D in Epileptic Patients? A Controlled Pilot Study  – 1974 Claus Christiansen, Paul Rødbro, and Ole Sjö

Also Dr. John Cannell talks extensively about seizures that are associated with autism and how that autism may be a result of vitamin D deficiency: “Vitamin D Deficiency’s Role in Autism”

Also Dr. Cannell has located many research articles that can be linked from PubMed through his research page on epilepsy.

ADP/ATP or your energy cycle in the mitochondrial bodies is important as this is where the energy for the sodium/potassium pump comes from.  Magnesium/calcium balance in the mitochondria is extremely critical in proper operation of this ‘energy engine’.  Some researchers claim that as much as 30 percent of the energy that is processed through these engines is used to maintain this balance.  It should also be noted that ADP and ATP are ions and the cation that this reaction works best with is magnesium.

We typically get enough calcium from our diets but whether we properly absorb the calcium is dependent on whether we are replete in vitamin D.  Magnesium however is another story.  I particularly like Krispin’s page on magnesium on how much is enough.  She is a life long nutritionist puts together a very clear way to get to proper magnesium levels.  Krispin’s webpage on magnesium.

Vitamin D levels that are replete tend to cause magnesium to be reduced in your body.  It typically takes about three months or longer for magnesium levels in the cells to reach a healthy value.  There are many research papers that you may access at www.mgwater.com.

Potassium is also not properly understood as you can see that we need a minimum of 4.7 grams per day from this report from the Institute of Medicine from February, 2004.  This article also tells you the proper  balance of sodium and chloride.  “Dietary Reference Intakes: Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Sulfate”

Krispin does a great job on how to determine how much potassium we should get in a day based on weight and what foods to get if from.  Krispin’s webpage on magnesium.

If you get a chance you may want to read her page on forgiveness:  this is great piece of work in how we our bodies relate to our environment and memory.

Iodine properly works for energy balance as well and I would suggest these two articles on iodine:

Donald W. Miller, Jr. MD  “Iodine for Health”

This recent article by Dr William Davis of the Heart Scan Blog written for life extension magazine:  “Halt on Salt Sparks Iodine Deficiency”

I know this is a lot but taking only neurotransmitter stabilizers without being sure that you have proper minerals for electrical balance is just a road toward bad health.  Remember the health of the brain activity is related to neural transmitter balance and electrolyte balance.  This is true of the heart as well as a majority of the cells in the heart are neural cells.

Remember that electrolytes are really inexpensive and cannot be prescribed so that is not much of a profit motive to actively treat using proper diet to achieve mineral balance.  Yet minerals may be more critical than neurotransmitters.  I have always suspected this was the case in depression.  Not enough potassium and magnesium to drive the signaling pathways.

EAT YOUR BUCKET OF DIRT!  Just kidding   – Pandemic Survivor