as small as a world and as large as alone

3:23pm February 15, 2014

clatterbane:

fatceliac:

fogblogger:

new-voice-same-thoughts:

plantbasedbabe:

Let’s start prescribing healthier habits rather than prescription pills!!!

CAN NOT ADVOCATE THIS ENOUGH people rely on drugs to solve their problems, if you have a minor headache it’s probably because you’re dehydrated or you need rest or food, don’t rely on painkillers so much to solve your problems!!

Man, next time I dislocate my hip due to my horrifically painful genetic condition I’ll be sure to just eat a few radishes and drink some more water. Why’d no one tell me how easy it is to deal with chronic pain?! Guess I’ll throw out my heart meds while I’m at it!

This shit fires me up so much. I spent almost 19 years vegetarian, five years gluten free, soy free almost a year and cutting corn/dairy/sugar much as I can reasonably. I buy organic produce. I eat my colors. I take supplements twice a day. I meditate. I do lite yoga. I get acupuncture.

None of those things magically erase conditions with no cure, with poor treatment options. None if those things are resolutions, they don’t even touch some things.

Let’s try this another way. Carrots are great for your eyes with vit A. Turmeric is great for inflammation. And even if you only ate those two things, it would not stop the inflammation of the cornea and optic nerve that leads to regular infection and vision loss in Lyme disease. They don’t fix. They regulate in healthy people. They are aspirin, which is fine you have a backache and not a bullet wound.

And only if that backache is coming from mildly strained muscles from overexertion, or something like that.

Food is not the root of all illness, and only healthy people can afford to think it prevents all illness or can replace medication.  I mean eating healthy food isn’t bad, and it can sometimes prevent some things, but most of the time it won’t prevent most things.

This sort of thinking also promotes disabled people forming an eating disorder called orthorexia, where you restrict more and more ‘unhealthy’ foods in a quest to become healthier, cure yourself, or become more spiritual, to the point that it’s interfering significantly with your life or preventing getting adequate nutrition.

For instance, a common diet sick people get told to go onto is a gluten-free diet (GF), or sometimes a gluten-free casein-free (GFCF) diet.  We’re told that if we haven’t “at least tried it”, then we aren’t doing enough to take care of our health.

But the reality?

GF diets only work in people who have things like celiac disease, gluten intolerance, and gluten allergy, things like that.  And contrary to the words of practically every quack doctor in the world, those things are not the cause of most illness and most sick people don’t even close to have them.  And many people who’ve been convinced by quacks or well-meaning friends and relatives that they have them, don’t actually have them at all.

And the promotion of the idea that most sick people need to go GF, hurts people who actually have real celiac disease or something else that makes them need to go GF.

Don’t understand that?

Okay… I have adrenal insufficiency, I was just diagnosed last week.  My cortisol level in testing was almost too low to measure.  My ACTH level (ACTH is produced in the pituitary gland and stimulates the production of cortisol) was low.  When they flooded my system with ACTH, they found my cortisol level went up, but not quite as high as they’d have liked it to go up.  This is how you diagnose real, bona-fide adrenal insufficiency.

When I started doing my research, I found out that adrenal insufficiency is something that quacks love to diagnose people with.  Basically some quacks will diagnose anyone with unexplained fatigue, with adrenal insufficiency.  This is a problem in many different ways.

First and foremost, it convinces their patients that they have something that they don’t, and prevents them from getting diagnosed with whatever their problem really is.  Fatigue is such a vague and common symptom that they could have nearly anything, from chronic fatigue syndrome (which is a seriously unpleasant disease with symptoms that go way beyond fatigue,  it’s like having a flu all the time), to thyroid issues, to autoimmune diseases like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, to something as severe as cancer.  If you’re not diagnosed properly, you can’t get treated.

Some of those diseases are life-threatening.  Some of them affect your quality of life a good deal.  If you don’t get treatment for your actual disease, this can cause pain, suffering, and even death.  Deliberately misdiagnosing people with celiac disease or adrenal insufficiency should be criminal for those reasons alone.  Not to mention that treating something you don’t have can make you sicker.

But there’s another reason it’s a horrible thing to do to someone.

And that is, that it harms people like me who really have adrenal insufficiency.  We struggle to be taken seriously when we say we have this, because there are quacks out there who will diagnose it in anyone who walks inside their door.  We have to describe to people the legitimate testing we went through, tell them we got tested with genuine medical tests in reputable labs interpreted by competent doctors, rather than getting dubious diagnostic tests (or even falsified ones) in equally dubious laboratories. 

And this focus on GF diets for people who don’t need them, it has the same effect on people who really genuinely have celiac disease.  People assume they’re in the diet because it’s a fad diet (and it really in most cases is a fad diet, even though as a fad it’s been stolen from a real medical diet), rather than because they really have celiac disease.  And that has a strong effect on their ability to be taken seriously for a genuine, potentially severe medical condition.  When there’s people out there falsely blaming gluten for everything from autism to multiple sclerosis.  

So all this was a roundabout way of saying – this insistence that diets will cure every chronic illness, even hurts the people helped medically by certain diets.  And it also, usually, blames every sick person for getting sick, because if we’d just eaten the right things, supposedly, then we’d be fine.

Healthy people are terrified of illness and death.  And in our society, they seem to believe that if they just do the right things, then they’ll be healthy forever, and by extension, live forever.  If they looked at that idea, they’d see it’s wrong.  But they don’t look closely at it, because they don’t want to be wrong.  They want to be healthy.  They want to live forever.

Most of the diets that people push on chronically ill people don’t actually help anyone though.  Things like raw foodism aren’t driven by health concerns, they’re driven by philosophical and spiritual concerns.  But then they get justified by claims about their effects on health.  And then when people with chronic illness happen to feel better after eating that way (which can be caused by anything from normal fluctuations in illness to spontaneous remissions to the false feeling of well-being the body generates when it’s not getting the same nutrients it used to) then they assume the diet cause it.  And then when their illness comes back again, which it generally does, they seek out more and more foods to eliminate, which is a rabbit hole that is always unhealthy to go down.

And posts like this encourage people to go down that rabbit hole.  As well as all the other damage they do.  So stop.  

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