Handling The Situation

      The first thing that I would recommend is to try to wean yourself off of medications, prescribed and over-the-counter. It could take a year for the effects of medications to dissipate, such as trigger points. Many don't realize how many side effects of medications are actually associated with or even mimic the effects of fibromyalgia.

      Exercise is critically important. You can start with 25 leg raises on each side while you're in bed, each day. Gradually, after a few months, you can build yourself up to a hundred a day on each side. Don't overly tax yourself.

      Walking outdoors, when the air quality is good, a half hour a day, is good for you, too, even if it's just a few days a week. It'll help you get the stale air out of your lungs, give you energy and invigorate you. My wife walks usually before she goes to bed and it usually helps her sleep much deeper. Always walk with a flashlight, so you don't twist your ankle or trip. And, if there's any kind of wetness outside, you have to be very careful. If there is snow or ice, I would avoid walking in the evening completely.

It's also extremely important to keep your electrolytes up, which regulate your heartbeat. These include potassium and salt. Most people don't realize that they need 2200 milligrams of salt per day. It is also important to keep well hydrated, but don't overdo this, since you can urinate out important nutrients, like water soluble vitamins and electrolytes. Sometimes, if my wife doesn't feel like doing anything, she will heat up some chicken broth and the salt in the broth gives her a lift. Or, sometimes, she'll eat a pickle and, ten minutes later, she'll feel more energized. It's good to know the sources of what you need for your system. Bananas are an excellent source of potassium. Potassium is also a mood elevator. Be aware of the way you feel is an authentic reaction to circumstances or the effect of wrong substances in your diet, or right substances missing from your diet.

      If certain foods cause you indigestion or gas, take a cup of milk before you eat.

Turmeric is very good for pain, but it only relieves pain for about an hour or two. It's not long lasting, but it's also not as unnatural a substance as many that they sell that you have to take only once, but run the risk of poisoning your systems with. Is it so much to take turmeric a couple of times if it means keeping your system clean? You can get tumeric capsules in the health food store.

My wife recently has been taking some ginseng capsules from the health food store. She isn't led by what the package says there, either. She doesn't take a full capsule as they are sold, she found that half a capsule works for her. She takes half a capsule every few days and it is a great mood elevator. It increases your motivation to do things. It's supposed to increase the dopamine in your brain, which is a big help.

      One of the most important dietary changes my wife had made, which she attributes all of her success to, is fresh killed chicken. The chicken in stores does not have the nutrients of fresh killed chicken. You should look on the internet for a live poultry vendor in your area. They exist, and there are apparently more than most suspect. The female chickens are more tender than the males, so try to get females. In choosing them, the females don't have a wattle under their chin, that's one way of judging them by sight. My wife puts the chicken in a Reynolds Brown In bag and cooks it for about an hour. No fancy rubs or marinades necessary, although my wife will use them, from time to time. And she saves the juice that's left over in the bag for the next day to add to store bought broths! She drains it into a cup and skims the fat off, the next day. Heating it up, she can add it to broths or she can add some ramen noodles to the juice and water. My wife usually takes it before she goes to bed several times a week. It's a perfect sleep aid. Chickens are close to turkeys, so they, too, have tryptophan, and that can put you into a deep REM sleep. Remember, REM sleep is the sleep you need, the sleep that, among other things, rejuvenates your muscles, and helps you wake up refreshed so necessary in conditions with fibromyalgia type symptoms. REM sleep known as rapid eye movement sleep, cause you to go into a deep form of sleep where you can work out your problems. It is necessary to feel refreshed. If you don't have REM sleep, your sleep doesn't really help you. A lot of people think they will take melatonin or some other sleep aid, and get the refreshment and rest that they need. They don't. Melatonin and other sleep aids do not provide you rem sleep, it just knocks you out and you wake up tired and unrefreshed. If you rub your eyes during the day, it could be a good sign that you have not experienced good REM sleep.

      When you have a serious case of fibromyalgia, you need chicken or the juice at least three times a week to restore your health. It could take a few months to a year before you feel the full effects of the chicken. If you can eat the chicken liver when it's cold, the next day, try to, because that can be very good for you, too. We put the chicken liver in the Brown In bag with the chicken and it adds a lot of flavor to the juices.

      If you have a lot of very sore muscles, my wife strongly recommends a Homedics professional model massager. The small ones are good for only minor non chronic issues. For fibromyalgia type symptoms, get the heaviest model with many settings in speed. Be careful not to overdo it with the massager, since you can make your muscles sore with overuse.

      If you have a very sore muscle, a very sore joint or a swollen joint, it's usually due to fluid buildup from inflammation. My wife gets frozen turkey legs from the Shop Rite and keeps them frozen and then she wraps them in a plastic bag, ties it in a knot, then she gets a pair of her cotton underpants, wraps them around the meat, ties it in a knot and places it over the area that's bothering her, like her knee or her neck. She keeps them in the freezer for compresses. It works much better than ice, it will always work much better than ice. Crucial here is stabilizing the temperature between the inflamed tissue and what's supposed to cool it. And that depends on thermodynamic properties. The thermodynamic properties of ice are far different than those of flesh! The turkey leg has a closer set of properties and so cools better! The turkey leg is better because it has a bone inside which freezes and keeps the leg colder longer. But don't put it directly on your skin or you can get a freezer burn. My wife uses underpants because they are effective in shielding from the cold, but they also are thin enough to let the cold work. After about an hour, you're going to urinate, removing the fluid that you worked out of the inflamed area. You'll feel better and you'll notice the swelling has gone down significantly.

      Another good thing to have is Jell-O. What many don't realize is that it's made from substances from cow joints. This makes it go directly to your joints to help with what they need to get better.

Another important aspect to the illness is avoiding, if at all possible, people who stress you out or agitate you, because that will tense all your muscles up and make you experience all the much more pain. You don't have to avoid them completely, but you can learn to deal with them better so they don't hurt you. If you can learn biofeedback, that is an excellent source of relaxation.

      And you have to learn that it's not just your mind and body, that there is a spiritual component. There is a direct connection between spirit, mind and body and you need it to get full help with this. My wife is Catholic and she tries to receive the Sacraments frequently.

      Inform yourself well of the nature of what you are taking into your body. Many people love soy products or claim to. In fact, among other things, soy contains substances which inhibits the body's absorption of crucial nutrients! Phytates, common in many soy products, prevent the body's intake of elements like zinc. Soy can be poisonous in amounts deceptively small compared to other substances. Soy milk, which so many swear by, or claim to, is synthetic estrogen and that can be very dangerous to ingest regularly. Many people use canola oil, thinking it comes from a plant called the canola! It doesn't! “Canola” is short for “Canada oil”! They claim the name was chosen to avoid connotations from the fact that it supposedly is derived from rapeseed, but there are other natural names also associated with rapeseed that could have been used. It should be mentioned that canola oil is in wide use in manufacturing biodiesel fuel, too.

      But also be careful of more natural things, in terms of overdoing. My wife took fish oil supplements every day for awhile and ended up with a severe urinary tract infection. Evidently her kidneys had trouble processing that amount of fish oil. This might not happen to everyone but be aware that it could happen. She knew it was from the fish oil since her urine spelled like fish. Many post-menopausal women suffer from urinary tract infections, known as “interstitial cystitis”. We have learned that these infections come about from not completely emptying the bladder. These infections can easily be eliminated by making sure to completely empty the bladder. Also, be careful of herbal supplements, even the more natural unprocessed ones. They sound safe because they're from plants, but not all plants are safe. Some can be very potent or toxic. Pharmaceutical companies use them in their medications. Be careful in using them, be wise but don't be afraid. My wife always takes half of what is recommended to see how she feels the next day. You could be allergic to an herbal supplement.

      A lot of people unwisely take vitamins every day. Many take massive doses, thinking that will help. There is a dangerous misapprehension that vitamins are “nourishment”, that people only need vitamins to stay healthy, so they could eat poor diets but, if they take supplements, they will be fit. But vitamins are not nourishment! Vitamins are catalysts, metabolizers, chemical go betweens. They need something to work on! Fats, proteins, enzymes, sugars. By themselves, vitamins are powerful, reactive chemicals, vitamins alone are strong poisons! They need nutrients to act on! Vitamins do not substitute for eating well! You need to supply what the vitamins in your system need to work on, or the vitamins will start taking you apart so they have something to act on! Taking vitamins on an already good diet can result in your body having more vitamins than it knows what to do with. There is no substitute for a good diet.

      I am not a physician, but Hippocrates wasn't a physician before he started collecting cures and methodologies, but these are things my wife uses to keep the fibromyalgia and other deleterious conditions away. We hope some of these tips will help you and encourage you.

Pain And Herniated Disks

      So often, when someone is swindled, it's a collaborative effort. A cooperation between the swindler, carrying out the scam, and, frankly, the “pigeon” doing their level best not to protect themselves from being scammed. It's tragic, often, to think about how vulnerable so many people leave themselves to being taken. Trusting anyone who has a diploma, as if that automatically makes them truthful, or if they just claim to have a diploma, or if they wear a white lab coat. Having no better than a tangential familiarity with understanding of the world. Failing regularly to assess claims made to see if they make sense or have any connection with reality.

      How many, going to a doctor, or “doctor”, with a rhinovirus, prescribed an antibiotic, were still sick a week later? Not all antibiotics are the same, and a rule of thumb is that the right antibiotic should provide measurable if not significant improvement within only a few hours! Sometimes, it can be as short as half an hour to an hour and a half. Four hours is the average. If you aren't feeling a great deal better by the next day, it's not the right antibiotic. But, tell the truth and shame The Evil One, how many had their “doctors” inform them of that? How many saw no sign of concern from their “doctor” when their antibiotic regimen lasted a week or more with no improvement? How many have gone a couple of weeks on antibiotics and felt no relief and ended up “justifying” that to themselves saying a cold will necessarily take a week to leave? How many have gone for weeks without improvement from their antibiotic yet failed to put two and two together to realize that that means it's not the right medication? How many have gone for weeks without their rhinovirus clearing up without realizing that that could lead to pneumonia and, at the very least, scar their lungs if not kill them? How many take the straightforward step of demanding their “doctor” actually provide some kind of service rather than just assume they must be doing good even though their patient is dying?

      How many know that antibiotics don't have targets of what to affect, they kill everything, all free-living organisms, even bacteria in the gut. And how many know that the bacteria in the gut play a crucial role both in digestion and protecting the gut during digestion? Even moderately long use of antibiotics can result in damage to the GI tract. How many “doctors” letting someone go a week or more with a wrong antibiotic warn them about that?

      But, then, how many ”pigeons” even think to put their “doctors” on the spot? Tell the truth and shame The Evil One, how many had their “doctor's” treatment fail, but didn't blame the “doctor”? How many said, “Well, they're a doctor so they must know everything! It can't be their fault?” How many blamed themselves for their “doctor's” treatment regimen failing?

      How many got a flu shot and promptly developed serious symptoms, such as pneumonia or sinusitis for six weeks? How many of their “doctors” warned them ahead of time that many vaccines are cultured in eggs, and, if you have an egg allergy, such a shot can affect you adversely? How many people don't even know they're allergic to eggs?

      How many know that, in 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which, among other things, acknowledges the real, measurable likelihood that vaccines declared “safe” and “necessary” can do anything from cause brain damage in a child to kill them and the Act frees them from any and all liability whatsoever? There is a federally funded compensation fund supposedly available, but to the extent that most vaccines are ordered as mandatory by the “government” and it's a rule of law that you can't sue the “government”, it's not surprising that two-thirds of all claims apparently get nothing, and, of those that do, most only get token payments. “Doctors” are required to provide parents with Vaccine Information Statements before every vaccination, but they apparently aren't required to tell parents how important it is to read the Statement, the monstrous truths about the vaccine the Statements will provide. And, no matter how horrible the effects the Statement describes, if the vaccine is mandated, you still have to let your child receive it!

      In dealing with “doctors”, among other things, it's crucial to remind yourself just how high a failure rate “medicine” does have, but doesn't advertise! In the end, as with car mechanics who may fix a problem but then damage something else that was in good shape so you have to come back and software engineers who deliberately insert holes in software and systems to allow infiltration and compromise your computer, if you aren't going to make yourself an expert so the others are merely consultants to your opinion, then at least remember to beware them all! Make them earn your trust, make them keep having to earn your trust.

      In being conned by the fibromyalgia swindle, a large part comes from people not knowing how things works. They look for superficial “answers”, even if it's two things acting simultaneously but having no connection. Then, frighteningly, many actually have the ability to self-hypnotize themselves into thinking that that connection always exists and only that connection exists, so if something else is more effectively demonstrated to have a connection, they won't believe, they can't believe it!

      They take a drug and get one or two symptoms of fibromyalgia, then “conclude” that that drug is the cause of fibromyalgia. Someone gets a temporary illness then shows signs of fibromyalgia and they “decide” that that illness brought it about. Then they talk to others and convince them and, finally, between illnesses, drugs, accidents, they don't know what to think causes fibromyalgia! Eventually, in the anti-reasoning tack so many seem to find so easy to fall into, it becomes not a matter of trying to find out what the cause is, merely to catalog all the different situations that others who are deluding themselves think gave them fibromyalgia, even when they only got one or two symptoms! Look to any forum or blog on fibromyalgia and see all the many, many, many different “explanations” for fibromyalgia from allergies to Legionnaire's Disease to malnutrition to radiation treatments to leukemia to misuse of steroids. Each comment can claim one, two, maybe even three distinct symptoms of fibromyalgia and so they declare that that is the cause. And so it never gets solved.

      A first step to getting an answer can involve simple common sense. Fibromyalgia has twenty or more recognized symptoms, from trigger point irritation to GI problems to muscle weakness to neuralgia to “fibro fog”.

      In the name of all that makes sense, what can attack all those many different areas simultaneously?

Not to say that something can't, but what and how? Will a single chemical, geared to one system of the body hit all of those separate systems? Can a germ that lodges in one part of the body, like the sinuses, possibly cause such distinct effects everywhere throughout the body?

      If there is one cause for fibromyalgia, it has to be something that has a connection with every part of the body.

      And there is one.

      The spine.

      Nerves from every part of the body enter the spine and travel along it to get to the brain. There is not a single part of the body that does not send information to the brain along nerve connections that go up the vertebrae. And the brain reads all these signals.

      But what if those signals were spurious? What if an illegitimate signal entered the brain? The brain has no way to know if a signal is true or false, only the sensation that it represents. Erroneous signals can produce sensations of heat, cold, electricity, even pain without there being an actual cause present.

      A defining quality of fibromyalgia, sensation without obvious cause!

And, in fact, there is a condition which can give rise to this situation. Vertebrae do not sit on top of each other, they have discs of gelatinous material between them to allow them to flex. The nerve fibers go through both the centers of the vertebrae and the centers of the discs.

      In the case of a certain class of injury, though, vertebrae can be forcibly dislodged, causing the disc between them to extrude. This is known as a “herniated” or “bulging” disk. Vertebrae tend to remain physically stable over a wide range of interactions that can cause discs to dislodge, but, when the discs herniate, they change their shape, they change their position.

      And, more often than not, they end up pressing on the nerves going through them!

      And this pressure gives rise to the phantom signals that cause the many, many sensations associated with fibromyalgia and for which no cause is known!

      Since different nerves tend to enter the spine at different points, you could almost determine where an injury is based on the phantom signals received. The spine is broken into three parts, the lumbar being the lowest, near the hips; the thoracic lying toward the middle of the trunk; and the cervical being the collection of vertebrae just below the entrance to the skull. Nerves from the lower limbs tend all to enter at the lumbar area, nerves from the trunk share space with nerves from the lower limbs while traveling through the thoracic spine, and the nerves highest on the trunk enter in the cervical area.

      As a result, all the nerves from every part of the body travel through the cervical spine!

      As a result, an injury to the cervical spine, a dislocating of the discs between any of the vertebrae, can produce phantom signals of pain from everywhere on the body.

      A single source for sensations from legs to mid-back to the GI tract!

      And something else many do not realize, but which answers many questions.

      The brain is not solely passive. It can react! When the brain senses a situation in a part of the body, even if that is a phantom sensation, it can respond. Fluid buildup, inflammation, raising blood pressure and body temperature. An entire panoply of real, actual conditions, stimulated by a number of nonexistent ones!

      When you are dealing with a large number of disparate symptoms like these, over many widely ranging parts of the body, all occurring from individual to individual to individual, it seems that an issue of cervical disc compression is the only answer.

      And, an old tenet, “If something does not solve a situation, it's not a solution for the situation”. Note the sheer, staggering multiplicity of “treatments” and “methodologies” for “handling fibromyalgia” that have not worked! Changing medication, back surgery, TENS treatment, painkillers, anti-depressants, epidural injections, acupuncture, pain management, physical therapy, changing diet. Many don't realize that things like antidepressants and painkillers can destroy your life as well as your health, since they tend to eliminate all caring that leads to solving all the other situations that can arise socially, financially, and so on. People need to be vigilant about all that is going on about them, at all times. But, in the area of “conventional 'medicine'”, alternative after alternative after alternative is tried and brushed aside! But at no time is legitimate chiropractic treatment for cervical disc compression ever mentioned! Yet the “experts” automatically demand that the gullible believe that it can't be the solution and so shouldn't even be discussed.

      And the unfortunates who, among other things, aggressively act the role of the “pigeon”, not only accepting what the liars say but literally incorporating it within their being! Tossing aside any criticism of the lie when they hear it; driving any thoughts that disprove the lie from their own head if they think of them; making a career of intruding in conversations to pontificate the lie; insinuating the essentials of the lie into their overall worldview philosophy; and, vice versa, seeing everything they know or learn as contributing to the “proof” that the lie they were told is valid. Eventually, it comes almost as a physical kick to them to hear anyone even question the lie; they cannot abide actual proof the lie is a lie; they continue their devotion to the lie even after the swindler admits that they were a crook.

      And, even among the less drastically self delusional, the principle remains true, no one holds “doctors” to a responsibility to perform, much less succeed, and, even if the “doctor” fails entirely, no one admits they failed.

      We all must work to recognize that we have to be able to think for ourselves, decide for ourselves, act for ourselves, promote our welfare over that of those charging us for “services”, be our own best advocates. We must discern for ourselves our best options in dealing with disc problems.

      Disc decompression can take a number of steps. Chiropractic, traction, specialized decompressive therapy. It can also take a while finally to have tangible results, but it's better than no results no matter how long you wait. In general, you should feel some significant improvement almost immediately, but it can take up to a year for most symptoms to dissipate. And it is a matter of maintenance. You have to be prepared to answer any changes with treatment, you have to keep up a regimen of common sense actions. You must guard your health, eat right, exercise and be well rested.

      In the next article, we will help you with some suggestions on relieving some of the symptoms.