Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Am I Really Losing My Mind?

I read an article recently that really stirred up some concerns about my wife. The article was published in the InforMS magazine written by the Rocky Mountain Multiple Sclerosis Center. In the article, Dr. Tim Vollmer is being interviewed about a new study that shows how inflammation affects MS and how MS patients can lose gray matter in their brain which affects their physical state. He spends time explaining how inflammation can cause damage to the neural component of the body. In turn, this neural damage can lead to disability and many other issues in the body. He states that the brain is capable of re-wiring itself to compensate for the gray matter loss during the inflammation, but over time the brain will run out of ways to compensate, thus leading to disabilities.

This article really got my attention. Over the last 7-8 years we have been on a course of natural health and focusing on overcoming MS with diet, rest and other natural therapies. We learned quite a few years ago that my wife had spirochetes in her blood and when we treated the spirochetes, her MS became better. We weren't able to completely treat the spirochetes to the point we would have liked, but a main issue they cause is inflammation. These same spirochetes were found in my father's blood who has Rheumatoid Arthritis. We know that inflammation is a major issue for arthritis, and I wonder how much of this is tied together. If our bodies are stressed from spirochetes, poor dietary habits, life and any number of other factors, is it any surprise that inflammation is the culprit of many of the issues.

The reason this article bothered me was that Dr. Vollmer states that at some point the brain is not able to compensate for the issues. He says in the article that he feels many times in remission that there is inflammation, issues and damage being done, it just isn't showing itself in the life of the MS sufferer. He ends the article with the thought that we should be trying to limit the amount of damage done by the inflammation and to try to reduce the neural tissue loss, with the later years of the MS patient in mind. I wonder at this point how much gray matter damage has been done to my wife's brain. This week has been an example of her struggling to keep a clear head and to stay on a train of thought. It really concerns me about how the damage done now will affect her in her 50's, 60's and 70's. This article brings a whole new meaning to taking care of yourself now to have a better life later. This just reinforces how important it is to make wise choices now about health and life. So, I guess I have to ask the question, "Is my wife really losing her mind?" According to Dr. Vollmer, she may be literally losing her mind, and the only way to stop the loss is to stop the inflammation.

3 comments:

Lee @ sjogrens blog said...

i have never heard of these spirochetes before. how did you discover them? Are they in the blood or the gut? Quite fascinating.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment. The spirochetes are something that we discovered when we started seeing a Naturopathic Doctor after my wife went numb for a month. He was able to show us the spirochetes on a darkfield microscope in our blood. They can live in the red blood cells and using the microscope, you can see them literally coming out of the blood cells after they are smashed on the slide. Pretty amazing stuff, and very hard to kill. We went through a very strict regimen and watched as we were able to see visible differences in the amount of spirochetes in our blood. One thing that makes this difficult is if you kill them off too quickly, you have a reaction that feels like the flu. This reaction is known as the herxheimer reaction. You can google any of this info and also check out other posts on this blog I have written about our experience. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

MD said...

you mean white matter. they are two extremely different things.