January 4th, 2010 | Posted in Holistic - Allopathic
Many autoimmune diseases, including myasthenia gravis, Lambert-Eaton syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome etc, are caused by a so-called autoimmune processes.
Some of the special cells involved in autoimmune process can attack host body organs or tissues directly, while others could produce autoantibodies – substances, circulating in the blood and accomplish the attack.
Antibodies, acting against the body’s own organs or tissues are known as autoantibodies.
Allopathic medicine solutions
Drugs-based treatment usually suppresses activity of deregulated immune system and sometimes additionally reduces inflammation of attacked tissues. That’s the most common approach to autoimmune disease for almost 50 years. Many newly introduced immunosuppressants are regularly becoming available, but all the synthetic medications used for autoimmune diseases treatment have serious side effects – especially when taken in high doses for years…
In the 1970s a new approach of autoimmune diseases treatment was developed. Medications that suppress the immune system or reduce inflammation are often combined with this new treatment, but they usually can be used in reduced doses.
Idea behind this new treatment was really simple: instead of changing to suppress the immune system only with powerful medication, it could be possible to mechanically remove autoantibodies from the blood during a process similar to dialysis treatment. The procedure later became known as plasmapheresis or plasma separation. It’s also known as plasma exchange.
Basics of all plasmapheresis procedure can be find in articles:
Plasmapheresis side effects
Plasmapheresis is a sort of invasive procedure, so it’s sometimes named “Blood surgery”
As any kind of surgery, this one also possesses some dangers:
- The most common problem is a drop in blood pressure, which can be experienced as dizziness, blurred vision, faintness, coldness, sweating or abdominal cramps. A drop in blood pressure can be remedied by giving intravenous fluid and adjusting patient’s position
- As medications to keep the blood from clotting during the procedure are usually used, bleeding can occasionally occur. Some of used medications can cause other adverse reactions, which, if allowed to progress, can lead to an irregular heartbeat or seizures
- An allergic reaction (begins with itching, wheezing or a rash) to the solutions used to replace the plasma or to the sterilizing agents used for the tubing can be a true emergency. Procedure must be stopped and the person treated with intravenous medications
- Increased suppression of the immune system can temporarily occur because of plasmapheresis, as during the procedure all sorts of antibodies are removed. In time, the body can replenish its supply of needed antibodies, but sometimes these are given intravenously after each plasmapheresis treatment. Special precautions against infection must be taken
- Medication dosages need to be adjusted carefully for patients during plasmapheresis because some drugs can be removed from the blood or changed by the procedure…
Holistic approach – enzymes
Therapeutic doses of proteases (protein digesting enzymes) act as an all-natural blood enhancer!
They break down all sorts of protein-based invaders in the blood supply, leaving them vulnerable to destruction by the immune system.
Protease is also known to act as a scavenger of oxidized and damaged proteins, is active in helping to eliminate blood toxins, modulate the immune system, addresses hormonal imbalances, speeds wound and tissue repair, helps to arrest and remove heavy metals and removes their toxins.
Benefits of proteases therapeutic doses (when taken on an empty stomach):
- efficiently removes blood toxins and clots
- presents a powerful immune-strengthening effect
- hormonal imbalances may be helped by oral protease supplementation
- enzymes capable of degrading immune complexes can ameliorate impaired kidney function
- oral protease supplementation leads to the formation of activated production of collagen and matrix proteins and then returns to its pre-injury structure
- clinical observations have noted that upon high intake of proteases, heavy metal concentrations have been significantly decreased in the blood. This may be due to the binding of these toxic substances with the supplemental protease enzymes, facilitating their removal
- oxidative reactions generate free radical damage to various molecules including proteins. Free radicals have been implicated in accelerating the aging process as well as several diseases, including arteriosclerosis, diabetes, and neurodegenerative conditions
- proteases may help hydrolyze and remove extracellular proteins damaged by free radicals
Protease side effects:
- therapeutic doses of protease can cause a burning sensation if a person has any of the following conditions: Gastritis, Gastric Ulcer, Duodenal Ulcers, Esophage Ulcers
Resume
Even superficial survey shows clear advantage of proteolytic enzyme (protease) therapy over traditional plasmapheresis.
Nevertheless, no officially trained doctor will advice an autoimmune patient enzyme treatment. There exist many different reasons (based mainly on pharmaceutical business aspects) for that:
Anyhow, it’s good to know different available options for dealing with all autoimmune diseases, including Multiple Sclerosis.
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PS Just reminder – I managed to stop MS exacerbations and stay on a permanent remission from 1997, using therapeutic doses of protease enzymes for over 18 months.
June 13th, 2009 | Posted in Holistic - Allopathic
Have you ever heard about FUD phenomenon?
No – it isn’t another terrible disease. Nevertheless, it’s something even more dangerous. For anybody! That’s how does orthodox medicine operate.
You see – FUD stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Just now you might be surprised: “What’s in common between cancer and these not-so-nice things”?
I came across this elegant explanation, as and lots of others, in the article
by a health ranger Mike Adams Cancer Industry Spreads Fear and Disinformation To Scare People Away From Learning About Alternative Treatments for Cancer on the Internet at his website NaturalNews. He describes all the system of persuading patients by cancer industry.
Although the author uses an example of cancer industry in his article, same
situation perfectly applies to multiple sclerosis and all other autoimmune disorders. I’ve cited some his perfect insights in my article MS – name ambiguity, describing problems with multiple sclerosis definition.
Here I will put some crucial excerpts from the article:
- …fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) initiated by purveyors of modern medicine in order to scare people away from finding information about cancer on the internet
- …let’s get to the bottom of this and look at the real reason why this kind of propaganda is being distributed through the national media. The real reason they are attacking cancer websites is because the internet is the only place people can go to actually learn the truth about the cancer industry and cures for cancer that don’t involve chemotherapy, surgeries, or other radical procedures offered by western medicine
- Frankly, organized medicine would rather people remain ignorant. They don’t want people to be informed about anything other than the treatments that they promote and control, and as a result they continue to engage in these FUD campaigns to discourage people from learning about health online
- Ideally what the industry wants is a form of censorship – they want websites to be flagged to indicate which ones are “official” (therefore -
best) cancer websites
- …person can undergo $50,000 worth of treatment and live an extra 3 months, and western medicine calls that a success, and it is their official position that that is the only treatment that should be available to sufferers of cancer – that if you go outside the system and find something that increases your lifespan by years or decades, then you are committing some sort of crime by venturing outside of orthodox western medicine
- …existing cancer industry prevents prevention. They are against prevention. They do not want prevention to be well known or to be adopted by medical practitioners, and one of the ways they do that is of course to spread fear and uncertainty about alternative cancer treatments through headlines such as the one I’m discussing here. If they can scare people away from the internet, then they can keep people ignorant of the true treatments for cancer
What I like in particular – it’s a nice analogy with plantation owners in the slave days of the United States. Mike Adams explains:
- it’s kind of like if you ran a plantation back in the slave days of the United States, you would make sure your slaves remained illiterate, because that way they wouldn’t gain enough education to venture out on their own and leave your plantation. In modern medicine, patients are like slaves, and the medical industry wants to keep everyone enslaved by making sure they don’t have access to good information about how to prevent chronic disease. “Keep ‘em dumb!” seems to be the slogan of organized medicine. The less you know about health and disease, the better they like it
Further the author presents major reasons for all this situation (the explanation perfectly fits for multiple sclerosis etc):
- When it comes to cancer, western medicine has failed. It simply does not work – it doesn’t cure cancer, it doesn’t offer any long-term benefit to patients, and it only results in massive costs associated with these
short-lived treatments. Alternative medicine and natural healing approaches, on the other hand, are inexpensive: they are safe to use, they are widely used throughout the world, outside the United States, and they’ve been proven safe through thousands of years of effective use by various populations of the world who know far more about medicine and healing than our so-called “high-tech” system of modern medicine
Look – I never experienced any cancer. However, as a (former) multiple sclerosis (MS) sufferer, I experienced similar kind of FUD – directly and indirectly.
As usually, everything everywhere starts with definition. I tried to describe
all the confusion in articles On MS definition and MS – name ambiguity.
To be able to do something with it it’s necessary to know it. It’s included in magic words: “Knowledge of how to have health gives greatest power” I’ve chosen as My Health Manifesto.
Having more knowledge you are less vulnerable to FUD !
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Even more information regarding history and different uses of FUD in different areas of human activity has been presented in a
Wikipedia article. It appears that:
FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative and dubious/false information designed to undermine the credibility of their beliefs
Knowing this marketing strategy usually helps to understand, what and why happens around.
April 30th, 2008 | Posted in Triggers
The predominant theory today is that Multiple Sclerosis results from attacks by an individual’s immune system on the nervous system and it is therefore usually categorized as an autoimmune disease. There is a minority view that MS is not an autoimmune disease, but rather a metabolically dependent neurodegenerative disease. Although much is known about how MS causes damage, its exact cause remains unknown -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis
Out of 700 listed in a database pesticides biggest part act as immunotoxins -
http://members.aol.com/rccouncil/ourpage/samples.htm
Immunotoxins trigger autoimmune diseases
An immunotoxin is a chemical that can cause immune system malfunction with exposure. When the immune system function is suppressed (immunosuppression) there is an increased susceptibility to infectious diseases and cancers. Polychlorinated-biphenyls (PCB), asbestos and herbicide DDT are known immunosuppressants. Immunotoxins can also cause autoimmune disease, where an overactive immune system attacks the bodies cells -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunotoxic
More: Poisons, toxins and autoimmune diseases
Chemicals – neurotoxins
A neurotoxin is a toxin that acts specifically on nerve cells – neurons – usually by interacting with membrane proteins and ion channels. Many of the venoms and other toxins that organisms use in defense against vertebrates are neurotoxins…
Toxins ingested from the environment are described as exogenous and include gases (such as carbon monoxide), metals (such as mercury), liquids (ethanol) and an endless list of solids. When exogenous toxins are ingested, the effect on neurons is largely dependent on dosage -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotoxin
Out of 700 pesticides, almost all are neurotoxins!..
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We easily came to a point where we see that multiple sclerosis can be completely triggered by toxic chemicals!
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April 29th, 2008 | Posted in Triggers
An autoimmune condition evolves when the immune system for some reason cannot distinguish between self and other.
Conventional (orthodox) way to treat all autoimmune disorders has been suppressing the (deregulated) immune system, and afterwards treating the damage to the involved organ whenever possible.
Holistic medicine uses a different – much better approach.
The root of it always remain the same:
- Remove the triggers that are deregulating (poisoning) the immune system so it starts damaging organs and/or tissues, causing the body to become “allergic” to itself
- Relieve the inflammation caused by tissues damage and hyperactive immune system
- Restore nutritional deficiencies that may be preventing the enervated immune system from knowing how to turn off hyperactivity once it is harmonized
Immune system is greatly complicated. Scientists are using hundreds of special (sophisticated) terms to describe it.
But we (ones attacked by autoimmune diseases) are interested, how such disorders, including Multiple Sclerosis, occur. Probably one of the best and very understandable ways of action of healthy as well as unhealthy (deregulated) immune system has been described in a book “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Autoimmune Disorders: The Revolutionary Drug-free Treatments for Thyroid Disease, Lupus, MS, IBD, Chronic Fatigue, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Other Diseases”. This book is real eye-opener.
Stephen Edelson, M.D., author of the book, has practiced medicine for more than 20 years. As an autoimmune specialist and Founder of the Edelson Center for Environmental and Preventative Medicine in Atlanta, he has successfully treated thousands of patients using innovative and effective alternative therapies.
Excerpts from the book:
- Unfortunately, there are millions and millions of individuals whose immune systems do not respond normally to an attack. Instead of attacking foreign invaders with antibodies-substances produced by the immune system to fight invaders-the immune system components attack the body’s own healthy cells-perhaps bones, joints, blood, brain, nerves, or other body parts-as if they were the enemy. When the immune system reacts in this way, it is producing autoantibodies-substances that attack healthy cells instead of foreign invaders. This situation is known as an autoimmune response
- More than eighty separate medical conditions have been recognized as being the result of an autoimmune response. Some of them are quite common; others are rare. In this book we concern ourselves with the more common conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, type 1 diabetes, autism, chronic fatigue syndromes, autoimmune hepatitis…
- While conventional medicine simply treats the symptoms, we heal the body by going directly to the origins of the disease-the autoimmune response at the cellular level. To get a better understanding of how we do that, it’s first important to understand why autoimmune conditions develop in the first place.The reason, I believe, is simple: direct damage and free-radical damage to cells from environmental toxins (heavy metals and chemicals).
So, immune system starts offending a host body after it is detuned by environmental toxins!
Nothing in this world happens without a reason !
November 13th, 2007 | Posted in MS enigma
Inspirational + educational
Multiple Sclerosis, some considerations concerning MS
Here Gerald Hendess from Germany, among others, depicts multiple sclerosis ‘advantages’ of all sorts for different groups.
MS has many advantages in comparison to other diseases
For those patients affected by MS:
- The disease is not immediately critical in most cases.
- The MS caused disturbances are often – at least partially – reversible.
- Most MS symptoms can be efficiently self-recognized by the affected patients without special instruments and more often than not, in more detail than the doctors.
For doctors and therapists:
- Basic source of income – patients will always come again at regular intervals
- No nasty surprises or any other spectacular thing happens during the general run of treatment. On the other hand the disease does continue with varied symptoms which cannot be foreseen, thus it does not get too boring.
- Not much danger of giving the wrong treatment. The treatment options are quite clear at the moment.
For the pharmaceutical industry:
- Colossal business turnover with presumably relevantly high profits for interferons etc (interested in pharmaceutical industry profits – look at MS Treatment Market will Reach $11.9 Billion by 2011. Those responsible have probably got blisters on their fingers from counting money. From the economic point of view, interferon is a brilliant success. Each consumer ensures an annual turnover of approximately 15.000 Euro. As the progress of MS is only slowed down but not cured by this medicine, most patients will be consuming for a long time.
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As one can see, MS has many positive aspects, although there is a certain amount of discomfort for those directly concerned
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Who wonders why, in a situation such as this, no solutions have been found to cure this illness. Research seems to be done mainly on a microbiological level concerning the primary inflammation. Perhaps, on this level, there is the possibility of finding something similarly lucrative to the interferons that are momentarily in use. This seems to be a rather complicated way of trying to find the cause of MS. The rather meager results that have been attained, confirm this impression.
Other attempts to find solutions for MS hardly find any interest. There are for example diverse epidemiological studies concerning MS, that open many other points of view. The Canadian geologist Dr. Ashton F. Embry (his son has MS) collected these studies and tried to come to conclusions of how to treat MS with nutrition (www.direct-ms.com). His aim was to identify the cause of MS and thus to improve or even cure the disease. His results should be followed up more consequently.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that only MS-patients have a real interest in curing their disease. How can it otherwise be possible, that such simple thoughts have not been followed up by professional research projects?
Reality check: there are some very powerful forces around (subjective as well as objective) that will never make Multiple Sclerosis treatable.At the same time there are other – user-friendly, natural, nasty and dangerous side effects-free ways to deal with symptoms of MS and other autoimmune diseases
By the way, I managed to cure MS, reverse my MS symptoms and stay on a permanent Multiple Sclerosis remission from 1997, using no dangerous pharmaceutical drugs
November 10th, 2007 | Posted in MS enigma
NewswireToday – Report Buyer, the online destination for business intelligence for major industry sectors, has added a new report showing the growth of MS treatments from $4.4 billion in 2004 to nearly $5.9 billion in 2006
“Multiple Sclerosis: Worldwide Market Outlook to 2011” predicts a growth of $6 million by 2011. The report shows the approval of four MS treatment therapies, which generated more than $1 billion in sales each in 2006, contributed to the market’s 15% increase over 2004.
The report predicts that new formulations for existing treatments and new developments, as well as the rising rate of MS across several regions of the world, will support a 15.2% revenue increase over the next five years.
An estimated 2.5 million people worldwide suffer from MS which is a chronic disease that causes significant disability, inflammation, and scarring of the myelin sheaths covering nerves. A decision by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to recommend Tysabri (natalizumab) for a severe form of multiple sclerosis (MS) offers UK patients renewed hope of regaining control over their disease.
NICE’s recommended the new MS drug Tysabri for use in patients with rapidly evolving severe relapse-remitting MS. With no other disease modifying drug recommended by NICE for MS, this recommendation represents a significant milestone for the UK MS market, although it is understood that this will have no impact on the ongoing risk-sharing scheme for other treatments.
The rapid, sustained uptake of Tysabri will result in it becoming the UK MS market leader by 2009, with sales of $29m. With the ongoing restrictions to other marketed drugs and Tysabri’s impressive efficacy profile, this market-leading status is forecast to continue through to 2016…
… Over a two year period, treatment with Tysabri has been shown to result in a 68% relative reduction in clinical relapses and a 54% relative reduction in the risk of sustained disability progression compared with placebo. Subsequently MS sufferers will be able to enjoy a more active and less dependable life.
The report concludes that the disease is undergoing dramatic changes. Regions that were once considered to have low incidence and prevalence of multiple sclerosis are now displaying increases that were not apparent even within the last 10 years.
“Multiple Sclerosis: Worldwide Market Outlook to 2011” focuses on currently marketed products in the MS market and includes statistical information for MS worldwide and by selected countries, with special emphasis on the major pharmaceutical markets: the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Full story
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I am sad looking at such an information. The only explanation for that – monster pharmaceutical industry wants to increase profits even more.
They will make everything to persuade MS sufferers that the only option to improve their life – usage of their terribly expensive and often generating serious side effects immunosuppressant drugs.
And they never tell you about existing non-invasive, natural user-friendly alternatives.
I know that – I managed to stop progressing of my initially actively progressing (2 attacks in 4 months) Multiple Sclerosis. Performed MRI scan clearly showed plaques thorough my brain.
At the same time my MS symptoms were growing quite actively. Routine official orthodox treatment – mega doses of methyl-prednisone (Solu-Medrol) – was applied for me. More details can be found in article MS cures story.
As my overall condition after that treatment worsened significantly, I started thinking: ‘Something wrong with this chemical etc treatment…’ and decided to finish my contacts with orthodox medicine.
Today, over 10 years on permanent MS symptoms remission, my health still slowly improves – completely without these nasty and highly dangerous synthetic drugs.
Final words:
- MS symptoms, as well as symptoms of all autoimmune diseases can be reduced (ideally decimated), using only natural, user-friendly medicines
- supposedly, my healthspan is slowly rising
All best
Czes Kulvis
