interactions Archives • Avoiding Rx

05Sep 2018 by Marjorie 12 Comments

I tried to detox lead and all I got was this stupid vertigo

interactions, nutritional therapy, self-experiment, side effects, symptoms and conditions, treatments

I developed vertigo after my second dose of DMSA treatment for lead chelation. For the next four weeks I had trouble moving quickly, standing up, going down stairs, etc., with no signs of it abating. Eventually I happened upon a comment on a heavy metal detox forum (on Yahoo, where untold gazillabytes of valuable information are inaccessible due to craptastic design) indicating that some people can't process sulfur due to insufficient body stores of molybdenum. Most approaches to lead detox involve sulfur, and DMSA is a walloping dose of sulfur. In fact, one study I found says that eating a whole lotta garlic can chelate lead. So I took 2,000 mcgs (2 mgs) of Mo the next day and the vertigo was gone the following evening. More notes on molybdenum:…

19Jul 2012 by Marjorie 3 Comments

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

interactions

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…

31May 2012 by Marjorie 5 Comments

List of my supplement reactions caused by induced deficiencies

interactions, side effects

(Updated Sept 2020.) When I first wrote this post I was still operating under the assumption that my health issues were due to nutritional deficiencies caused by 31 years of undiagnosed celiac disease. Since then I have identified as the culprit systemic inflammation and liver damage caused by lead, mold, and iron poisoning. I spent far more time than I should have on the nutritional therapy angle, but what can you do. I did discover some interesting interactions during my experiments, and I record here the ones I am most confident about. I had a lot of success treating many complaints, but the unrecognized environmental damage slowly overwhelmed it all ... note all the "headaches, insomnia, suppressed breathing" entries. As I've mentioned in more than a few posts, reactions to…

29Feb 2012 by Marjorie 8 Comments

On “developing a tolerance” to a supplement

interactions, side effects

I occasionally encounter people who use the expression "developed a tolerance" to describe that annoying phenomenon in which a supplement works for a while to treat whatever symptoms you're complaining of, and then stops. Tolerance is more accurately used in the case of prescription drugs or, alas, controlled substances like alcohol or da ganja, and doesn't really apply to supplements. Although tolerance to drugs and controlled substances builds up for different reasons, they are much different mechanisms than what happens with most supplements such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc. A common cause of tolerance to a drug is that the drug causes your body to produce less of whatever substance the drug was meant to enhance. This happened to me when I first took clonazepam for insomnia. The drug…

19Jan 2012 by Marjorie 2 Comments

Don’t take folic acid and methylfolate at the same time

interactions, supplements

Someone on a B12 deficiency discussion group mentioned that he'd found that if he took folic acid (the synthetic version of the naturally-occurring folate) at the same time as methylfolate (a much more bioavailable supplement of folate; AKA Metafolin), he would start to get folate deficiency symptoms, even though he was supplementing it like a crazy person. I experimented myself and found the same thing -- the folic acid cancels out the methylfolate. Folinic acid will do the same. Because nothing can be easy. I swear to you I found a PubMed article confirming that folic acid deactivates methylfolate if taken AT THE SAME TIME, but of course I lost it. But if you Google "folic acid blocks" you'll find all sorts of discussions about it. This is a separate…

07Sep 2011 by Marjorie No Comments

Diagram of how various deficiencies can egg each other on

interactions, symptoms and conditions

Soon after I discovered that typical guidelines about iodine are outdated and wrong (1), I came across information about vitamin K that made me realize the amounts I had been experimenting with were pathetically small. Also, it is possible that vitamin D supplements affect vitamin K, which for me would explain a lot (2). This is yet another example of how difficult it is to find reliable info about all the nutrients and how they work in the body and interact with each other. Here's a diagram of how I suspect my iodine, vitamin K, vitamin D, zinc, and iron deficiencies have been interacting. 1: You can find a list of iodine references at the bottom of this Breast Cancer Choices' iodine investigation page. 2: From the World's Healthiest Foods…