31Jul 2012 by Marjorie No Comments
Month 2 of Operation Electrosmog Reduction

Month 2 of Operation Electrosmog Reduction

self-experiment
(Last updated April 2023.) (See also part 2 of the electrosmog reduction experiment.) My annoyance with the reception delay on my cell phone started me on a path that led to Ann Louise Gittleman’s book Zapped: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn’t Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution. Read More Month 2 of Operation Electrosmog Reduction
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21Jul 2012 by Marjorie 8 Comments
SSRI withdrawal, sleep paralysis, and pseudo-alien abduction attempts

SSRI withdrawal, sleep paralysis, and pseudo-alien abduction attempts

chronic unexplained illness, The Weird
As I've learned more about prescription meds I have re-evaluated the disastrous health symptoms that led me to switch to a gluten-free diet 14 years ago. At the time I had just stopped Zoloft after 18 months. I knew nothing about SSRI withdrawal except that it could make you feel briefly worse if you didn't lower the dose carefully, but since I had always been on the smallest dose available, I thought it didn't apply to me. For more than a decade I assumed that the seizures, insomnia, memory loss, etc. were the culmination of 30 years of malnutrition caused by undiagnosed celiac disease. I still am not entirely clear on what was due to what, but I did learn recently that two bizarre experiences I had during that time…
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19Jul 2012 by Marjorie 1 Comment

If iron interferes with your thyroid function or thyroid meds, you might need zinc

self-experiment
After I started taking the Armour Thyroid to treat hypothyroid symptoms -- including that lovely one where your hair feels like there's an electric current going through it -- I quickly realized that the 50 mg of iron I was taking every day for my abysmally low ferritin levels was making things worse. (Armour is a prescription medication of desiccated pig thyroid, a type of preparation that has been used since the 1890s.) Even if I separated the doses by the requisite four hours or stopped taking the Armour altogether, I got more hypo-T symptoms -- low mood, cold, fatigue, and insomnia. Taking the Armour only fixed the symptoms to a certain point because of the low ferritin (which was at 6 for several years before any so-called health practitioner…
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17Jul 2012 by Marjorie No Comments

50,000 IU doses of vitamin D might not be such a great idea

self-experiment
A commenter (Blake) on a recent post directed my attention to Dr. Stasha Gominak's series of videos on her work treating sleep disorders with vitamin D. The videos run more than an hour, but here's a summary of some of her points. One of her points -- of course, not covered on the summary -- is that those whopping 50,000 IU vitamin D pills that some doctors give to their patients to take once a week are not as effective as taking it daily in smaller amounts. I'm not sure if she was referring to the fact that the majority of those 50,000 pills used to be in the D2 form, which is not as effective, or to a claim I've read elsewhere that past a certain dose, the larger…
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