Posts Tagged ‘medication’

Fibromyalgia patients need more than pharmaceuticals. What is needed is a solution, and the only way to find it means knowing the cause. If there ever was a condition crying our for a natural solution this is it.

Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a condition that has a profound impact on one’s life. The range of symptoms are so great than everyday living becomes a chore. From constant pain, interrupted sleep, fatigue, sore muscles, headaches, irritable bowel, anxiety and depression the condition is takes away any feeling of well being.

The fact that this is diagnosed in females aged 20 to 50 years of age doesn’t help. Until the pharmaceutical companies found a drug for this condition, most doctors thought of it as either a psychological problem or an imagined one. Now, it has an official diagnosis, which requires that there are a certain number of designated tender points that are extremely sensitive to pressure induced pain.

Pharmaceutical Solution

Pharmaceutical solutions can be anything from antidepressants, painkillers and anticonvulsants. Lyrica is an anticonvulsant and the first medication approved by the FDA  specifically for fibromyalgia. The list of medications for this condition has become quite long. Cymbalta and Effexor Cymbalta and antidepressant approved by the FDA to treat fibromyalgia pain, Paxil and Zoloft for sleep, wellbeing and pain relief. Elavil and other trycyclin antidepressants are often prescribed. This has side effects such as weight gain, dizziness and fatigue.

With all these drugs complete relief from the pain isn’t always possible. That is why the natural route seems a good way to find a solution.

Natural Approach

There are ways to restore normal function. Emerging evidence is being to see fibromyalgia as a metabolic condition. One of the areas being look at is how this condition is tied to low thyroid function. The evidence is pointing in that direction. Right off the bat there can are some overlapping symptoms that makes this well worth looking into. More women that men suffer from both hypothyroidism and fibromayalgia. The fibromyalgia symptoms are usually more severe, but they both create havoc in the patients life. From fatigue, depression, digestive issue and muscle weakness both conditions are debilitating.

Vitamin D Deficiency

There is a link between fibromyalgia and vitamin D deficiency. Muscular pain and weakness can be a sign of a vitamin D deficiency. What studies show is that Fibromyalgia sufferers have deficiencies of calcium and serotonin. These contribute to the depression, since vitamin D helps create serotonin, the feel good hormone, this vitamin is extremely important. Serotonin helps you sleep better, and reduces grain fog, depression and anxiety.

Vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium, which helps your muscles relax. The Mayo Clinic has identified a relationship between low levels of vitamin D and chronic pain.

Ribose Supplementation

D-Ribose is a 5-carbon sugar (unlike 6-carbon glucose sugar), directly involved in the production of “ATP”. The body uses this sugar for energy production. Many patients that supplement with D-Ribrose have experience significant improvement. This is especially true in muscle strength. Patient’s with fibro reach the anaerobic threshold in their muscles earlier. Their muscles get tired faster and are using less of the available energy. Ribrose increases the muscles energy pool which reduces the metabolic strain in affected muscles. This allows the patient to resume activities that tired them out before.

Restoring Health

The way to restore your health naturally, means seeing that you aren’t deficient in either nutrients or hormones. Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) is a powerful antioxidant, which helps restore energy in the form of adenosine triphospate (ATP). This is deficient in people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Physical activity provides some pain relief along with improved sleep. There are many people that see benefits of a diet consisting of vegetable juicing, fruits, seeds, and barley grass juice. A whole food diet is essential to healing.

The one modality I don’t want to leave out is Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care. Many patients were able to resume their full activities after treatment.

The war on drugs should begin here in your medicine cabinet. This will help you avoid more problems than what you are being treated for. Just because it is refillable doesn’t mean you should.

There is growing skepticism about whether the FDA is making the right decisions and making them appropriately. People can’t depend on what the FDA decides since drug safety doesn’t have tight restrictions.  Not the kind than really mean anything to the average user.

Medications results are not as simple as black and white. Diabetes medications may get the numbers to look right, but they add nothing to longevity. Only a change of lifestyle can help with overall health. If the drug companies had to report past experiences to make new drug sales they would be losing business. However, a consumer with a short memory is what they count on.

The flagging sales of a drug means they just have to reposition it. They also have to find ways to built fiction into fact. The biggest investment for pharmaceuticals may be the job of getting the right advertisement, marketing, and lobbying. The pharmaceutical footprint is found in our waterways, soil, and livers.

In all fairness there is a case for acute care drugs. However, the money is in long term use for chronic condition. The expanded market reach calls for some reflection. The current trend is to depend on chemicals to change everything in our lives.

Staying involved in your own health is the most effective way to prevent the need for medical intervention. The future will see a dramatic increase in our dependence on unnatural substances to give us natural health.  

The truth is until the war on drugs start in our medicine chest, we will never win the war on illegal substances. Most illegal dug use is the kind than comes from a growing dependency on pills to solve our problems. Our kids get high on it and adults need higher doses more often to get any results.

Thinking ourside the pills, powder and liquids that dominate our everyday existence means exploring natural living. Before you can dump the pills you have to first stop what made you ill in the first place. Creating a healthy lifestyle means blasting your system with vitamins, minerals through good nutrition. There are many foods and some herbs that can stimulate, regenerate, protect, and saturate your body with powerful nutrients.

The war on drugs begins when one gets right to work on their own lifestyle.

Type 2 Diabetes facts are quite different from the hype. The new term is “diabesity” and it is reaching epidemic proportions. It is seen in the aging population, young adults, and youngsters. It is a combination of obesity and diabetes.

Type 2 Diabetes        

“Type 2 diabetes is a lifelong disease that develops when the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin or when the body’s tissues become resistant to insulin. Insulin is a hormone that helps the body’s cells use sugar (glucose) for energy. It also helps the body store extra sugar in muscle, fat, and liver cells.”  This is from MSM healthline.

Type 2 diabetes isn’t a disease; it’s the cumulative effect of lifestyle. This is how the body behaves under certain circumstances. If we call diabetes a disease, which it is not, we do untold damage by trying to put a bandage on it. Medication isn’t going to reverse the condition, it covers up the symptoms.

Lifestyle Factors

Type 2 diabetes isn’t a choice. The lifestyle that leads up to the condition is a choice. This is not something that people think about in that way. However, if obesity rates keep rising there will be more cases than ever before.

Drugs have not been successful in preventing and reversing type 2 diabetes. The clinical cause of diabetes isn’t going to be anything other than lifestyle. Type 2 diabetes is not an illness. The condition starts long before the actual diagnosis.

Studies have shown that type 2 diabetes can be prevented. The fact is by preventing and reversing diabetes you will stave off heart disease and cancer while protecting your brain.

Halting Diabetes

Halting diabetes isn’t as difficult as one would assume. Alternative methods work very well. Most people aren’t well informed and continue to have numerous health problems that follow this condition.

Mainstream medicine doesn’t have a clue to what this condition is, and what it takes to turn it around. All the prescriptions in the world haven’t conquered diabetes. Yet, people who changed their diet were able to not only control the condition, but reverse it.

People assume that there body is a workhorse, which goes on under any conditions. Ultimately it boils down to be the lethal effects of sucrose, and excess calories. Diabetes has become an epidemic as our diets have incorporated more fast food, processed foods, and enormous amounts of food.

The higher the glycemic the diet, the more insulin is released, this leads to inflammation. When you elevate your blood sugar, high glycemic foods promote oxygen free radical processes, Free radicals are highly reactive molecules which damage DNA, and cause inflammation.

The standard American diet is a high glycemic one, with pro-inflammatory sugars and refined carbohydrates. High glycemic diets are directly linked to most chronic conditions. The way to halt diabetes is to watch the glycemic load values of your foods. By remembering that refined foods have high values and minimally processed foods such as vegetables have low values. A whole food diet is a way to halt all chronic conditions.

Glucose

Scientists have known that diabetics have a greater incident of heart attacks, strokes, and some types of cancers. In a study released by John Hopkins University scientist, even healthy people with higher normal blood glucose levels were shown to have more cardiac events.

Excess glucose contributes to arthrosclerosis and heart disease. The point here is the people with higher normal blood glucose levels aren’t completely healthy. Our medical experts wouldn’t know healthy if they fell over it. The medical establishment uses poor guidelines to judge health.

They are disease oriented, not health generating. Studies have documented the fact that higher glucose readings put you at risk for vascular disease. Conventional medicines flawed understanding that glucose metabolism affects the whole body.

Inflammation the Real Problem

Diabetes isn’t just a disease with one dimension it is an inflammation marker. There is research that points to inflammation as a cause of diabetes. It is now thought in some scientific circles that low-grade tissue inflammation related to obesity contributes to insulin resistance, the major cause to type 2 diabetes.

Increased body fat that is associated with obesity is not the direct cause. Obesity can cause inflammation and inflammation can cause obesity. Now if we view diabetes this way we realize we need a holistic healing model to follow.

People who are obese, many times suffer from chronic inflammation and are resistant to insulin, the hormone that removes sugar from the blood and stores it as energy. An interesting point is that rheumatoid arthritis, an inflammatory disease, heightens the risk of developing insulin resistance.

So if inflammation is the cause of diabetes, this disease has to be looked at as a whole body disease. Now that changes the dynamics and the treatment plan.

Taking care of glucose levels with medication is a bandage at most, and at worst it can lead to a further decline in health. That is why people on a whole host of medications wind up with the lethal effects of diabetes anyway.

Inflammation is a major reason why people with diabetes get heart, kidney, eye disease, and cancer. Treat the inflammation with low inflammatory foods and watch the improvement.