Articles for category: symptoms, US healthcare system

What you might not know about liver damage

(Updated April 2024.) In 2014, out of frustration at the lack of progress about some stubborn health issues, I started revisiting previously abandoned theories about their causes, including liver damage. Usually I would abandon a theory due to insufficient information on the topic, insufficient confirmation because of lack of access to decent testing facilities, or ...

Waves of pain radiate from the hinge of a skull's jaw

TMJ: a total PIA

I have never been officially diagnosed with TMJ. I’m just assuming that the term applies to the condition I experience every few years or so wherein sitting in one place longer than 20 minutes makes want to rip my jaw out and stomp on it. I keep moving it around, trying to get it to ...

Marjorie

Flowers grow out of a scary black metal helmet.

Things that still mess up my mood

August 13, 2017: My theories on this subject have changed. Until I can get my act together to update this content, please see this post. This was adapted from a post on my old blog, Blessed Depth. I’ve written elsewhere about how I threw off the yoke of my decades-long depression about 15 years ago, ...

Gray squiggly lines on top of a pastoral landscape.

Riboflavin supplements and eye floaters

As they tend to do occasionally, in 2016 my cursed eye floaters got worse again, but this time I was able to narrow the cause down to riboflavin (vitamin B2) supplements. I found a discussion of this unfortunate tendency in an online floater forum called Floatertalk, where several members had experienced an increase in floaters ...

Three brass bells.

Tinnitus: a product of low GABA?

(See my March 24, 2013 post for results of my experiments with GABA supplements.) According to this ScienceDaily article on a new study about tinnitus, when a hair cell is damaged or dies, the neurons usually receiving input from it keep firing anyway, even though there’s no data coming in. They “become more excitable and ...

A rolling landscape made entirely of yellow and white pills.

Back to the ’70s for asthma treatment

Update July 2022:  This problem improved a lot when I started doing vagus nerve stimulation exercises. I also noticed that on days following activity that involved lifting very heavy (for me) items, my breathing would be easier. About six years ago I realized I was getting very tired every time I visited a home with ...