insomnia Archives • Avoiding Rx

25Nov 2012 by Marjorie No Comments

Two months of experiments with melatonin supplements

In another attempt to kill my insomnia I revisited melatonin supplements a few months ago. I had tried them 15 years ago, once, when I was sleeping three hours a night, whereupon I slept for 24 hours. That kept me off the stuff until a few years ago, when I tried them again, using the dosages listed on the labels -- 1.5 mg, 3 mg, etc. I could feel it working and I got sleepier and sleepier and then...nothing. I get the same effect when I use amber light bulbs and amber glasses, which prevent blue light from turning off your melatonin production at night. Especially if I'm reading, I'll get sleepy and doze-y for about 30 minutes and...nothing happens and I'm wide awake again. Clearly a crucial step is…

25Aug 2012 by Marjorie 9 Comments

Two months using an Earthing sheet

self-experiment

Updated 09/04/12: Martin Zucker, a co-author of the book mentioned here, has offered a suggestion for improving my experience with the Earthing appliances. See comments. For about two months I've been using an Earthing sheet, which was invented by Clinton Ober to lower the electrical current on the body to what it would be if you were standing barefoot on the ground. Ober's theory is that since we evolved that way, our bodies are optimized at that current, and messing with it can cause health problems. What with all the power lines, cell phone towers, wi-fi, appliances and electronics we use now, we're exposed to much more current than we were 40 years ago. Using a splitter and a voltmeter from the hardware store you can compare your body's voltage…

17Jul 2012 by Marjorie No Comments

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

supplements

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…

30Dec 2011 by Marjorie 3 Comments

Scientific American article series on self-experimenters

nutritional therapy, self-experiment

While investigating insomnia I came across this 2008 series of Scientific American articles on eight people who've been experimenting on themselves to investigate a variety of hypotheses. The subjects include a cybernetics professor who's wired his nervous system to a computer, the playwright who made the movie "Super Size Me," and a cardiologist who tried an obscure drug to stop his alcohol binging. The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting, finally resolved his insomnia by moving breakfast back a few hours. He also curbed his overeating by ingesting several tablespoons of vegetable oil a day and as a result lost a significant amount of weight. Then he wrote a diet book about it and gained a significant amount of attention. One expert's…

05Jul 2011 by Marjorie 10 Comments

Rx, OTC, diet-, and needle-based ways to treat hypothyroidism

symptoms and conditions, treatments

Last updated July 2022. Also see this post on how iron interferes with thyroid meds. It took me two years from the time I first suspected I had thyroid problems to get treated for it. I was very tired, had a weird, periodic hum in my body as if the ship's engine on "Star Trek" was running in the background, was unbelievably cold outside in the winter, and my hair felt like it had an electric current running through it. But my test results from my traditional doctors, who were only looking at TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), always came back normal. When I read that ideally other markers should be looked at as well (e.g. T3, T4, etc.) I asked for those tests, but they, too, came back normal. (Here's…