Tag Archives: alternative health

Trigger Points

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So this has been something of a revelation.

I’ve come across the term “trigger point” more times than I could hope to count, over the years. I’ve had massage therapists mention them. I’ve read about them on websites. I’ve noticed them in my muscles — spots where even a little bit of pressure is hugely painful.

I never looked into them very much.

The fact is, there is so much alt-health information out there, and 95 percent of it is either garbage or irrelevant. It’s hard to sort through it all. It takes time.

But in the past few years my hands have been giving me trouble. My fingers seemed stiff a lot. My knuckles have been sore. I’ve noticed that my forearms have developed numerous tender spots as well.

This started a year or so after I took up golf — but golfing itself never hurt or seemed to tire my hands, and resting from golf didn’t seem to have an effect.

That puzzled me.

My fear, of course, was that it might be arthritis, but none of the alt-health things I tried for that seemed to help. (My doctor concurred it could be arthritis, and suggested I use Ibuprofen. Fine for alleviating symptoms, of course, but I wanted a cure.)

Then a week ago I ordered a copy of The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition — this being Clair Davies’ classic trigger point book.

It turned out to be an eye-opener.

First of all, I had no idea how much science there is behind the trigger point-based pain model.

I also didn’t realize that the right kind of massage can get rid of trigger points. I thought massaging trigger points was itself a way to alleviate symptoms. I didn’t realize that you can heal trigger points, and by so doing eliminate referred pain at its source.

Anyway, for the last few days I’ve been attacking some of my most troublesome trigger points, and I’m amazed at the results.

Most notably, the pain and stiffness in my hands has resolved probably about 90 percent — and I’m only getting started.

I also have a strong hunch that I finally — FINALLY — have a way to get rid of my headaches.

And I’m gaining a new understanding of the source of specific little aches and pains. For years, I’ve had a problem, on and off, with a dull ache under my right shoulder blade. Who could have known that the source was a muscle in the front of my neck? Yet when I massage the right trigger point, it hurts in that spot inside my shoulder — the exact same kind of hurt, in the exact spot.

I bought the book hoping to make my hands feel better.

I entertain larger ambitions now!

I’m not only going fix my hands. I’m going to get rid of my tendency to headaches. And I’m to systematically hunt down and extinguish trigger points in ever muscle in my body.

Wish me luck — I’ll post updates here as I go.

Iodine and heart disease

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Several blogs, including Instapundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, and JustOneMinute have picked up Nicholas Kristof’s Dec. 4 piece in the NY Times that calls attention to the problem of iodine deficiency in third world countries, such as Pakistan.

I’ve just been reading a 2006 paper by Stephen A. Hoption Cann, PhD, published by the American College of Nutrition, Hypothesis: Dietary Iodine Intake in the Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease which states that the “proportion of the US population with moderate to severe iodine deficiency (<50 µg iodine/L in urine) has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

That’s right here at home, people.

I posted in August about my own experimentation with iodine supplementation. Today I typically take 25 mgs/day — thousands of times the RDA — and the results have been incredible. Now that winter’s here, for instance, I’ve noticed I don’t get cold as easily, and my skin doesn’t feel dry and itchy like always has in past winters. And of course, the fibrocystic breast tissue that was with me since my 20s is completely gone.

I’m a believer. I’ll never stop taking the stuff.

I just hope other people catch on & start taking it too.

What I find most fascinating about the whole subject is that iodine is so critical to so many of the human body’s biochemical systems that you have to wonder: how pervasive is the impact of our epidemic of iodine deficiency?

Obesity is an obvious candidate for thought. It began taking off in the United States during during the late 1980s. That corresponds pretty closely to the 20-year timeframe cited in Cann’s paper.

Some of that is probably because we no longer get any iodine from bread. The FDA “explicitly approved bromate for . . . use in bread through the standards for bread and rolls promulgated in May of 1952.” One of the flour conditioners potassium bromate displaced, with the FDA’s blessing, was potassium iodate.

Another likely factor is that we’ve been instructed to reduce salt intake. When we’re urged to cut back on salt (which the National Research Council was doing as far back as 1989, and probably further — I remember my grandfather being told not to eat salt in the 1970s) then we’re not necessarily eating enough iodized salt per day to get even the RDA for iodine.

Then there’s this: does the salt you sprinkle on your pommes frites provide as much iodine as it’s supposed to? See this e.g. (translated I think from French — but you’ll get the gist) (Update: Link no longer works, sorry):

Iodine content of reference iodized salt was 38.53?6.92 on June 1997. After the salt was stored at room temperature with a relative humidity of 30 % -45% and in sealed paper bags for three years, iodine content changed to 18.25 ??4.72. Thus 52.63 % of was lost in approximately 3.5
years. This means that standing time and storage conditions is very effective storage of iodine in food.

Cooking conditions is very effective on the stabilization of iodine. In the case of oxidants in diet loss of iodine is more effective, 82% of iodine may lost during the high temperature cooking oxidized medium. So it is advised to consume iodide to put the food not before the cooking after the cooking. On the other hand, if consuming of iodide not advised to people who have problems with their thyroid, long term treatment at oven with an mild oxidant may loss 81% of iodine and 55% of iodine without an oxidants.

Less obvious is iodine’s role in other bodily systems that aren’t obviously linked to the thyroid.

Like heart disease, for instance.

That Cann paper I linked up top explores the correlation between low iodine levels and cardiovascular disease. Talks about selenium as well, another nutrient that’s deficient in our diets.

Here’s a taste:

Uotila et al. [18] made the observation that subjects who died from coronary sclerosis often had goitre. In order to further examine this phenomenon, 250 Finnish subjects who had died from coronary heart disease were age and sex-matched to controls who died from other causes [19]. The risk of death from coronary heart disease was found to be significantly higher in individuals with goiter (odds ratio (OR) = 3.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.43–4.99). It was noted that the average thyroid weight was higher in those dying from coronary disease. Moreover, among the coronary disease cases with goiter, there was a lower average age of death and a higher average heart weight. Due to the low iodine content of foods and lack of an iodization program at the time, endemic goiter was common in Finland, particularly in the east.

Well worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Good Sunday eve reading ;-)

The point Kristof tries to make in his NY Times article is that nutrient supplementation makes for boring public policy. He is referring to foreign aid/humanitarian policy, but the same is true right here at home. We’re happy to pour billions of dollars into breast cancer research, for instance (the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation alone has spent $1 billion over 25 years). And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where’s the enthusiasm for using iodine supplementation to prevent breast cancer? It’s not there — not on anything like the pink-ribbons-everywhere scale of mainstream breast cancer campaigns — because it’s such a prosaic and unpatentable approach.

But think about it.

Iodine supplementation may well be an very inexpensive way to address a whole range of very costly health issues that are faced by a huge majority of Americans.

What would become of the “healthcare crisis” if that proved to be the case?

Iodine goes mainstream

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Featured on the front cover of First magazine as the “food switch” that “revs metabolism by 250 percent.”

Like I’ve written before, for some reason I seem to stumble upon alt health trends ahead of the curve. Iodine is a perfect example. You will start seeing lots of articles about it in the very near future.

A good portion of them, of course, are going to be Scary Warnings about how Dangerous it is. Navigating these things is tricky.

Threshold Guardians abound.

Previous post about my Iodine decision here.

Adventures in Iodine

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I’ve hesitated posting about this subject because of all the alt-health things I’ve tried, this may be the one that is a true lightening rod. But I’m going public: since late spring of this year, I’ve been orthosupplementing with iodine.

I didn’t work up the courage to try this overnight. I first heard someone speculate that iodine deficiency might be ubiquitous about four years ago . . . that was from Ingeborg Eibl, a Rochester, New York chiropractor (and btw gifted healer).

Eibl mentioned iodine to me and gave me photocopies of some research papers to read. I looked them over but didn’t take it any further.

What’s changed since then is that the Internet now offers a wealth of information about iodine supplementation.

I started reading.

Most of the information is based on the work of a couple of medical researchers. Guy Abraham is one of them–he’s the driving force behind The Iodine Project, through which thousands of women have been supplementing with iodine to evaluate its ability to protect against breast disease.

Abraham and other pro-Iodiners share a couple of premises. First, that iodine is essential to a broad range of metabolic processes, and second that we’re not getting nearly enough from our diets (no, not even if we’re eating iodized salt).

How broad do I mean by “broad range?”

This broad:

The commonly accepted medical opinion is that iodine’s only role in the body is to help make thyroid hormones. Although this is an extremely important function, Abraham demonstrates that the role of iodine in the body goes far beyond its function of making thyroid hormones. Other possible functions include: helping to regulate moods, preventing cancer (especially in breasts, ovaries, uterus, prostate and thyroid gland), preventing and treating fibrocystic breasts in women, helping to regulate blood pressure, helping to regulate blood sugar and prevent and treat diabetes, and helping to prevent abnormal cardiac rhythms.

Here’s another iodine supplementation website worth perusing. The page I’ve linked presents categories that themselves hyperlinked to pages with additional information, so you can read about Iodine and the breast, heart, immune system, gastrointestinal system, skin (I’ve read elsewhere that 20 percent of the body’s iodine is found in the skin), glandular system, lungs, eyes (“Iodine occurs in large quantities in the ciliary body and lachrymal glands of the eye. It has been related to cataract formation and glaucoma, and is seen as useful in treating eye infections. Iodide has been found to be protective against UVB radiation.”), mouth (“The salivary gland concentrate iodine 20 to 100 times serum levels.”), bones, and blood (“Iodine has been studied as an antioxidant in human blood and has been found to be as powerful as Vitamin C.”).

Unfortunately, although iodine was once touted as a highly beneficial nutrient, its reputation was tarnished in the mid-20th century. Abraham recounts what happened here. A couple of researchers injected rats with iodine, misinterpreted the experiment results, and extrapolated the misinterpretation to humans. Our government, which has never seen a cow pie too small to miss, went right for it, splat: it used the so-called Wolff-Chaikoff effect to help set the official RDA for iodine at a miniscule 150 mcg/day.

To make a bad decision even worse, most of us are probably getting even less Iodine than the RDA. Iodine was once commonly added to bread — it acts as a flour conditioner — but that has declined since the early 1980s (bread makers today often use bromide instead, which is molecularly similar but unfortunately not very good for us. Hell, why mince words, the s**t’s toxic, it’s poisoning us, and we’re exposed to it by far more than in the bread we eat — from pesticide residue to the fire retardants sprayed on our mattresses.)

There’s some iodine in some seafood, and in seaweed, and of course there’s iodized salt — but it’s debatable whether we eat enough iodized salt to maintain optimum iodine levels.

Mainland Japanese, meanwhile, consume considerably more iodine, because they eat quite a bit of seaweed. Abraham uses as his guideline 13 mg/day. Here’s a lower estimate, but at 1.2 mg/day it’s still nearly 10 times the US RDA.

Now. There’s a huge debate going on about all of this. I spent weeks reading arguments on both sides, including a series of articles published by Townsend Letter that pits Abraham and another M.D., David Brownstein, against Alan Gaby, M.D.

And maybe I’m being a damn fool. But in the end, it’s like the witticism that if you have two clocks you never know what time it is, while if you have only one clock you always know. I decided to trust the clock that says we should be eating more iodine than we are.

I also took it easy, especially at the beginning. Upping iodine can displace other molecules that one might have built up in the body, including the aforementioned bromide, as well as fluoride and mercury. I followed the advice published on this website, including taking the companion nutrients that have been identified as useful to help offset the “side effects” of bumping up iodine levels.

I did experience periods of what I believe to be detoxification. The worse came within a week of starting. The symptoms were uncomfortable (headache primarily, flu-like symptoms) but temporary. I took a break for a couple of days (pulsing, per Breast Cancer Choices) and never experienced those particular symptoms again. More recently I’ve hit a different set of (much milder) symptoms which I believe are caused by the displacement of fluoride and/or bromide in my body. As before, I pulse to give my body a chance to rest and “catch up” on eliminating the offending substances.

Other than these episodes, the experience has been amazing. I feel sooooooo good. It’s hard to describe. I was healthy already; I was a happy gal already. But I can tell there is something very different about how my body runs now. It’s akin to how you feel when you’ve been hungry, and finish a delicious meal. A kind of visceral sense of well-being. I should also report . . . sorry to be vague about this, can’t quite bring myself to discussing certain benefits explicitly . . . my experience bears out the promise of the research on breast health. It’s turned back the clock. How’s that for a benefit.

I would never go so far as to urge this onto other people. The plain fact is that many people should start this under the guidance of an iodine-savvy health care practitioner, particularly people who have existing thyroid conditions or who are sick or whose bodies are more compromised than mine with mercury or other toxins. (Here’s one place to start looking for a practitioner.)

But I would strongly, strongly urge everyone to take the time to look into it for themselves. I believe most of us are iodine deficient, and that one day in the not-too-distant future that will become a widely recognized fact. I believe that we’ll come to understand that a staggering range of systemic imbalances that are overtaking so many people, thinks like obesity and hormonal problems and osteoporosis, will be traced to lack of iodine.

You heard it here.

In the meantime, if this has grabbed your attention, do yourself a favor and start educating yourself. Don’t wait for mainstream medicine to catch up.

Migraines are hell

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And the monkey on my back that I can’t seem to shake.

Any ideas for alt treatments that you have, please share! I’ve run out of ideas. What I’ve tried: chiropractic, various nutritional supplements, progesterone cream, drinking more water, warming my hands & feet during the pre-headache stage, avoiding triggers. Nothing seems to help consistently. Anyone have any other ideas?