Posts by dyan campbell
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whoops, wrong discussion.
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It still surprises me that people blame stress for CFS. Of course stress is never good for anyone, that's what stress means. But I think we have to stop blaming stress, (or other psychological factors, Dyan) just because we don't know the pathology for what's gone wrong.
But stress isn't a psychological factor any more than it is a physical factor. In childhood "failure to thrive" is a very real and life threatening condition. Is it psychological or physical? A mother in labour will stop being in labour (any mammal species here, not just us) if you stress her sufficiently. Flood those receptors with cortisol and what do you get? Well, no labour, that's what. You can't draw a line between physical and psychological.
Psychosomatic does not mean that the illness does not exist. It means the illness is actually manifesting there, in your body.
By "stress" I mean a specific, well studied pathway called the HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenals) - it has its own, very damaging and specific pathology.
Remember when peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and patients with ulcers were told not to worry so much and they'd get better?
WOW! Boy, do I remember that! Oh. My. God.
I have been hit by a car - trapped under it and burned by something hot under there - leaving me with bones exposed in 3 places, burned and with a head injury. I have had 3 surgeries the repair the damage since - and not one bit of that (including a knee reconstruction) could begin to touch the pain from a bleeding ulcer.
I had a very bad duodenal ulcer in my first year of university - 1980-81 which in those days was not only years away from being linked with any specific pathogen, but was treated in some of the worst ways imaginable. They told me to drink milk! Full of protein!
The ancient Romans (and Chinese) had better advice: between meals drink water with few teaspoons of lemon juice. The milk makes the stomach secrete the protein digesting enzyme pepsinase, which causes the stomach to digest the parts of the stomach that are ulcerated. The latter causes both stomach acid and digestive enzyme pre-cursors to slow down ther rate of production, slowing the stomach's ability to digest its unprotected (ulcerated) sites.
I was lucky enough to have the first wave of histidine repressors (Tagamet) combined with a hippy-dippy GP who also advised me to eat yoghurt, barley, blueberries and at least 1gm vitamin C a day. But in hindsight the fact that my boyfriend had a duodenal ulcer just before me, well, hindsight is 20:20.
And then those Aussie researchers found that the ulcers are caused by a particularly nasty bacterium, and that antibiotics fix them? Those researchers won the Nobel Prize.
Much deserved, and I gather at least one of them infected himself to prove his theory. Impressive. Crazy perhaps, but impressive.
Until we know what causes CFS, I think it's smarter to say we just don't know.
The neurobiology of the disorder is becoming apparent - and through this understanding of how CFS can result from either head trauma or stroke (any kind of brain injury) they are starting to understand how they might better treat all forms of CFS.
There is a new model for understanding of pain emerging - from the world of neurobiology - and pain is literally in your head. They have known this for a long time, and few people could doubt the real nature of phantom limb pain, but is only now that the understanding of pain as being "all in your head" is really beginning to have some value in the treatment of pain. Chronic pain, and possibly chonic fatigue are beginning to look like equivalents of phantom limb pain.
The symptoms are very real, very debilitating. Bart, you might not find a pathogen to blame for CF but they also haven't found one for lupus, MS or rheumatoid arthritis. This doesn't mean they can't accompany a huge cytokine mess in your body. All of these illnesses are made massively worse by stress, just by feeling emotions.
You can have a searing pain in a limb, and you can have that with no wound and indeed, no limb. It doesn't mean the pain isn't real, but it does mean that the messages in the brain saying "PAIN!" are not useful in that context.
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Peter, you've never seen Emma, who is enviably fit.
Bart, it's not the CF that causes brain injury, but that brain injury is associated with CF.
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex modulates fatigue after penetrating traumatic brain injury
Background: Fatigue is a common and disabling symptom in neurologic disorders including traumatic penetrating brain injury (PBI). Despite fatigue's prevalence and impact on quality of life, its pathophysiology is not understood. Studies on effort perception in healthy subjects, animal behavioral paradigms, and recent evidence in different clinical populations suggest that ventromedial prefrontal cortex could play a significant role in fatigue pathophysiology in neurologic conditions.
Methods: We enrolled 97 PBI patients and 37 control subjects drawn from the Vietnam Head Injury Study registry. Fatigue was assessed with a self-report questionnaire and a clinician-rated instrument; lesion location and volume were evaluated on CT scans. PBI patients were divided in 3 groups according to lesion location: a nonfrontal lesion group, a ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesion (vmPFC) group, and a dorso/lateral prefrontal cortex (d/lPFC) group. Fatigue scores were compared among the 3 PBI groups and the healthy controls.
Results: Individuals with vmPFC lesions were significantly more fatigued than individuals with d/lPFC lesions, individuals with nonfrontal lesions, and healthy controls, while these 3 latter groups were equally fatigued. VmPFC volume was correlated with fatigue scores, showing that the larger the lesion volume, the higher the fatigue scores.
Conclusions: We demonstrated that ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesion (vmPFC) plays a critical role in penetrating brain injury–related fatigue, providing a rationale to link fatigue to different vmPFC functions such as effort and reward perception. The identification of the anatomic and cognitive basis of fatigue can contribute to developing pathophysiology-based treatments for this disabling symptom.
It's the HPA axis folks.
You can't really separate the neurobiology from the symptoms, and whether a disease is psychosomatic or the result of a head trauma, it's still a set of symptoms that need to be managed.
If you experience enough stress you will gain weight on your abdomen, where it will turn into a kind of evil pancreas. It's a psychosomatic manifestation of stress - with an attendant plunge in health (and rise in inflammatory markers). The abdominal fat is real, the effects on your health are real, but the cause can be entirely psychological. Feel enough stress, and you will have an entirely different metabolism
In China, where actual clinical depression is rare, the rate of somatic disorders) as seen in children in the west under 5 - at which age they usually stop manifesting somatic ailments and manifest anxiety or depression, just like adults) - in China somatic disorders remain the big indicator of stress.
While "psychosomatic" may have unsympathetic overtones, it is just as much a rash, pain, vomiting, fatigue or headaches as it would be if it were a virus or a genetic abnormality.
I got the opposite of CF when I first moved here but it was pretty awful in its own way. Couldn't eat, felt sick at the smell of food, couldn't sleep, it was pretty horrible it its own way.
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Feel better greetings from me, Emma!
I think it's completely accepted that CFS is a very real disorder - cytokines (inflammation) gone mad - and like a lot of other hormone mediated diseases, it can certainly be triggered by pregnancy.
You're probably read this information as it's quite old, but if you haven't it may be interesting
Neuroendocrine perturbations in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome
Also - Julie Fairey:
My own experience tends to fall in line with the theory that for some with CFS it may be the result of a form of brain injury suffered during glandular fever.
The brain injury observation is also consistent with post-stroke fatigue syndrome - often misdiagnosed (though usually accompanying) depression.
What is more, in the first study of its kind, these doctors discovered the actual size of the adrenal glands in a small group of CFS patients was half that of normal persons. However, like Demitrack, they feel the origin of this problem may not be with adrenals themselves.
Interestingly, immune system problems often seen in CFS correlate with neuroendocrine imbalance since adrenal hormones including cortisol regulate various aspects of immune activity. Under-functioning of the adrenal glands, called hypoadrenalism, could “encourage a state of chronic immunological activation” according to Anthony Komaroff M.D. of Harvard’s School of Medicine. Thus a Dutch study published earlier this year found that ‘the interaction between neuroendocrine system and the immune system is disturbed in CFS.’
Any kind of inflammation reducing thing - virtually anything that will reduce the inflammatory markers in your blood - will be of benefit. There are a lot of different things - you already do yoga I think, which is excellent - but everything from fanatical gingival health to eating blueberries, salmon and walnuts every day is beneficial. Absolutely anything that helps to lower inflammatory markers,which help just about all conditions come to think of it.
By the way, your writing is excellent and I am far from the only person here who is an enthusiastic fan. If dazzled fans could chase away CFS you'd be fine!
Thanks - and check out what Bertrand Russell thought about idleness:
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I can't even remember what the original packaging looked like, honestly.
Oh, my dear Emma that's so sad. But someone (was it Jolisa?) wrote of a process where you can get it bejazzled, or vajazzled or something. Get it covered with rhinestones to make it all purdy.
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"I agree - they are very much the old guard of the rugby/racing/beer NZ male stereotype."
For the first year or so after I moved to NZ I was genuinely under the impression that nearly all people in NZ (with the exception of my husband Paul and my mother in law Myrtle) were racist, sexist and homophobic. Actually come to think of it, my M-I-L was pretty sexist and homophobic but I loved her dearly, as she hated racists, loved Paul and was immensely kind to me.
Within a few weeks of moving here Paul gave me a copy of James K. Baxter's poems Pig Island Letters to "help explain" his culture. But I was shocked that he had spent a lifetime accepting crap from people who insulted his mother, his heritage or anything, if they prefaced it with the comment that it was "a joke".
I was equally shocked and deeply horrified to find complete passivity was the socially appropriate response to offensive behaviour. Some guy grabbed my breast at a barbeque, saying "ooo-errr, that Paul, he's a lucky man" and had the nerve to complain that I bruised his arm doing the classic self defence move (windmill at 12:00) in response to anyone grabbing any part of me from the front.
Within a year or so of moving here I finally met lots of NZers who were really not that type, and I began to love this place. Cautiously at first, then later with some enthusiasm.
It was an overwhelming relief to me to discover that the pro-apartheid, pro-bullying, sexist, racist, moronically dull demographic in NZ was just that - one small slice of a very diverse pie. But good god, I got sick of the "jokes" and the "good natured banter" that was for the sake of provocation, or as they call it "stirring". I went around mentally muttering that line of Woody Allen's "Oh, for a great big sock filled with manure" .
This society seems a good deal healthier to me now than it did 22 years ago, but I may have a skewed perspective based on the type I first met when I moved here.
The concept of sexist and racist bullying does seem linked to certain sports, and the same type exists in Canada, but the boundaries are way, way different. Sex with an unconscious person in Canada is and always has been viewed as rape.
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NZ has GE labelling requirements
Canadian consumers have not been granted the same respect by food producers, though I understand this may change soon.
The irony here is that the manufacturers will have a much harder time selling what are probably harmless products because consumers are so angry with having had no choice (in the form of labelling) for so long.
2008: Private Members Bill defeated: A Private Members Bill to label genetically engineered foods (C-517) introduced by Gilles-A. Perron of Bloc Québécois was defeated in the House of Commons in April 2008.
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BTW insects are highly nutritious. It is only that Britain does not host sufficient numbers of large edible insects that eating them is not culturally part of our diets, here or in NZ.
Are you kidding me??
I'm not from NZ, I'm from Vancouver. Half of my family grew up eating this stuff. Some of them took it in their lunchboxes to school, until fellow students put them off.
Not just the Chinese... I've eaten curried grasshoppers - they were made by a friend from Kenya.
I've already said here - twice - that I don't mind eating GM food.
I mind having corporations foist this technology on consumers who overwhelmingly don't want it. I mind that people who don't want to consume these products have no right to demand it be labeled. Not all of us live in the UK or NZ.
I mind genes being patented by corporations. I mind having companies bypass specific legislation controlling the use of this technology and releasing organisms (in Canada) that have not even complied with what regulations are already in existence.
See the David Suzuki quote a page back.
@Dyan Campbell
Well I am 44 so I am not sure what your age has to do with anything.I was being flippant in reply to your assertion that "you happen to have met the man" rather than dispute my use of Lewis Wolpert's quote.
When you said "I happen to have met the man" and I interpreted this as a game of social one up-manship.
Isn't it?
I made reference to my age because saying "so there" seemed the proper way to end my part of that conversation, what with me winning that particular - utterly irrelevant - contest.
But this sort of exchange is laughable and better left on the playground. Which is why I said, being so old and all, I would leave off the "so there".
My phrase "Aw, big whoop" was suitably in a 10 year old's vernacular. It was my attempt as a mocking kind of joke, but including myself in the mockery.
Not that any of this - how well either of us knows Lewis - has anything to do with the discussion at hand.
We need to clip and quote specific passages - then argue the point. People keep attributing my quotes of Lewis Wolpert's, David Suzuki's to me, then setting up straw man arguments. Like this
Some argue that the nature of the imagined catastrophe is so unrecoverable that even miniscule is too great. That's a much harder thing to discuss because it's easy to imagine truly catastrophic scenarios. People have come up with world ending scenarios and even the more reasonable environmental disasters proposed are scary. It doesn't take much knowledge to go around scaring the pants off people
Take it up with the Union of Concerned Scientists or the David Suzuki Foundation then. Don't attribute all their arguments to me.
If we are going to have any kind of coherent discussion, we must pay attention to the specific arguments and confine our responses to those arguments, rather than inventing new, unrelated arguments - straw men.
NZ has GE labelling requirements just like the UK has. So unless you are illiterate or stupid or too lazy to read a label I fail to see how or in what way you are being 'forced' as a consumer to eat GE?
I'm Canadian. Please refer to my quote of David Suzuki's in the post above.
Speaking of which, Dyan, what's your position on the LHC and similar devices? Is the risk so enormous and so under-understood that we shouldn't go there?
I invariably agree with any consensus reached by members of
Union of Concerned Scientists because they're scientists, not "people with a science background working with technology", as Lewis Wolpert phrases it, in his book The Unnatural Nature of Science. -
Not me here, I'm quoting David Suzuki:
More science [is] needed on effects of genetically modifying food crops.
In gearing up for the 2010 release of its super-genetically modified corn called “SmartStax”, agricultural-biotechnology giant Monsanto is using an advertising slogan that asks, “Wouldn't it be better?” But can we do better than nature, which has taken millennia to develop the plants we use for food?
We don’t really know. And that in itself is a problem. The corn, developed by Monsanto with Dow AgroSciences, “stacks” eight genetically engineered traits, six that allow it to ward off insects and two to make it resistant to weed-killing chemicals, many of which are also trademarked by Monsanto. It’s the first time a genetically engineered (GE) product has been marketed with more than three traits.
Canada approved the corn without assessing it for human health or environmental risk, claiming that the eight traits have already been cleared in other crop seeds—even though international food-safety guidelines that Canada helped develop state that stacked traits should be subject to a full safety assessment as they can lead to unintended consequences.
One problem is that we don’t know the unintended consequences of genetically engineered or genetically modified (GM) foods. Scientists may share consensus about issues like human-caused global warming, but they don’t have the same level of certainty about the effects of genetically modified organisms on environmental and human health!
A review of the science conducted under the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development in 2008 concluded that “there are a limited number of properly designed and independently peer-reviewed studies on human health” and that this and other observations “create concern about the adequacy of testing methodologies for commercial GM plants”.
Some have argued that we’ve been eating GM foods for years with few observable negative consequences but as we’ve seen with things like trans fats, it often takes a while for us to recognize the health impacts. With GM foods, concerns have been raised about possible effects on stomach bacteria and resistance to antibiotics, as well as their role in allergic reactions. We also need to understand more about their impact on other plants and animals.
Of course, these aren’t the only issues with GM crops. Allowing agro-chemical companies to create GM seeds with few restrictions means these companies could soon have a monopoly over agricultural production. And by introducing SmartStax, we are giving agro-chemical companies the green light not just to sell and expand the use of their “super crops” but also to sell and expand the use of the pesticides these crops are designed to resist.
A continued reliance on these crops could also reduce the variety of foods available, as well as the nutritive value of the foods themselves.
There’s also a reason nature produces a variety of any kind of plant species. It ensures that if disease or insects attack a plant, other plant varieties will survive and evolve in its place. This is called biodiversity.
Because we aren’t certain about the effects of GMOs, we must consider one of the guiding principles in science, the precautionary principle. Under this principle, if a policy or action could harm human health or the environment, we must not proceed until we know for sure what the impact will be. And it is up to those proposing the action or policy to prove that it is not harmful.
That’s not to say that research into altering the genes in plants that we use for food should be banned or that GM foods might not someday be part of the solution to our food needs. We live in an age when our technologies allow us to “bypass” the many steps taken by nature over millennia to create food crops to now produce “super crops” that are meant to keep up with an ever-changing human-centred environment.
A rapidly growing human population and deteriorating health of our planet because of climate change and a rising number of natural catastrophes, among other threats, are driving the way we target our efforts and funding in plant, agricultural, and food sciences, often resulting in new GM foods.
But we need more thorough scientific study on the impacts of such crops on our environment and our health, through proper peer-reviewing and unbiased processes. We must also demand that our governments become more transparent when it comes to monitoring new GM crops that will eventually find their ways in our bellies through the food chain.
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See, when these fuckers look at all that oil in the water, they don't think "Look at all the damage we're doing" they think "Look at all that oil were losing".
Earthy, colloquial and dazzlingly accurate. I nominate Steve PAS's local Mark Twain.