The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I can't google anything useful about my issue and Claude is largely unhelpful, the doctors try to diagnose me with depression (I have a very well managed SAD, so I technically might qualify but this is not the main root cause), sports medicine physicians just don't exist where I am, so I want to dump the list of the symptoms I have and see whether you guys can help me come up with a direction to dig.
The main issue: when I do sports, whether it's cardio or weightlifting, I find it really hard to sleep. Fundamentally, my sleep is more fragile. I fall asleep easily all of the time, but when I work out it's easier for me to wake up during the night (for any reason, e.g. noise, wanting to go pee, being too hot, being too cold) and harder to fall back asleep after I wake up.
I desperately want to see a doctor, but they are trying to diagnose me with a mental health problem rather than a chemical imbalance. Feel free to ignore my complaints about doctors and suggest me to see a doctor, but I'd be grateful if you could spell out what I should say to him.
The simplest explanation is that exercise is depleting nutrients that you are currently borderline low in.
Have you tested your Iron and Ferritin levels recently? RLS is caused by not enough dopamine being processed by certain receptors. One of the co-factors for this process is iron. So low iron will by definition cause RLS. It could be something else causing low dopamine but since magnesium helps you temporarily, it seems worth trying.
Do not trust the doctors if they try to pin your problems on something psychological. They just default to that when they don't have a clue. I would also wager that your depression is a symptom of a underlying physical problem.
Solving nutrition / chronic illness problems is very complicated and very few people know what they are doing. Experimentation and sceptical but open-minded reading is sadly the best approach that I have found.
If I were you I'd try a basic multi-vitamin before and/or after exercise (just one with reasonalbe RDA, like 50-100%) and a high-quality (but low potency, iron poisoning is a thing and is very bad) iron supplement. Try it for maybe a week (or until you feel something), then re-evaluate. If something gets better try to figure out what. Since just spamming supplements without understanding them is bad long-term, but fine short-term, usually. So ordering some blood tests and researching the results is also recommended. Doctors will only react when the values are profoundly bad, especially if you are young.
When I got diagnosed with RLS, doctor did a blood test but did not find any kind of deficiency. I think it’s worth trying it again. Testing supplements myself is a good idea, I’ll try it after ruling out electrolyte imbalance. Thank you!
I don’t think I’m currently depressed, but let’s see whether any of the advice I got here changes my mind on this!
Look up the blood test values yourself if possible. Doctors often skip pointing out values on the verge of terrible, because unless they have studied nutrition on their own, they will basically know nothing about it. Except "Value X below Y is very terrible because of Z. But value X = Y + epsilon is fineeeeee". Very few have a coherent model about the body.
I'm sorry. I misread your post. Your reaction seems perfectly normal in that regard then!
Tell me about it.
Me: I think I have anemia. My score is just above the threshold and I’m tired all the time.
Doctor: But it’s not below the threshold, so you don’t.
Me: but it’s literally as low as you can go without passing the threshold, right at the bottom of the ‘healthy’ range. Presumably almost having anemia is pretty nearly as bad as actually having anemia. Can’t we bump up my iron levels a bit?
Doctor: yeah, that’d be normal procedure. If you had anemia.
I can only imagine how annoying that is as a patient but problems like that are unfortunately not what our system is optimized for.
If you recommend something that makes sense but isn't quite justified (because the labs are normal for instance) then you introduce a huge amount of liability if something goes wrong, and good luck getting it paid for if the patient doesn't meet whatever criteria.
Additionally, medical care is in general about preventing someone from dying, "minor inconveniences" (that nonetheless may be subjectively quite inconvenient) are generally not something we are equipped to manage (this being for a huge variety of reasons).
An extra level is the need to avoid fighting with patients unnecessarily.
In this specific case there are other significantly more likely causes of tiredness. Lifestyle habits (including diet, exercises, stress, substances, caffeine, sleep habits, etc etc), psychiatric issues, and boring things like aging are way more likely to be responsible.
I have no idea about you personally, but many patients are extremely resistant to having one of these pointed to.
Lastly there's a bunch of complicated stuff about reference ranges, additional studies, lab uncertainty, diagnostic nonsense... overworked primary care doctor is not going to bother.
Thanks for the reply! It’s always interesting to get a medical perspective on these kinds of interactions.
One wrinkle is that this actually took place in Japan, where medical care is extremely cheap (heavily subsidised) and efficient but as a consequence it’s very process-oriented. Most discussions with a doctor cost $5 but take about 5 min; that transcript was pretty nearly the whole conversation, although to be fair that was partly because I had a more urgent problem.
I take your point about other lifestyle factors; I wanted to treat my ‘anemia’ so I could rule it out and apparently taking strong iron tablets is dangerous without medical supervision.
Regrettably I don't think your interaction would have been any less unsatisfying if it was in the U.S unless you were seeing a concierge or something like that. While the social pressures at play are pretty different in Japan it's also possible that you were getting a "saying you should try a little iron but not too much" without saying it type interaction, as you might here but it would be more easy to understand.
The problem is that you are more likely to catch someone who demands some form of intervention, any intervention and does so incautiously and then injures themselves than someone who actually has a personal biochemistry that is somewhat atypical and would benefit. Not saying you are one of those, but the majority of the global population is total morons so the practice of medicine has to be optimized around that (and smart people can also be morons when it comes to medicine).
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I assume that you're a doctor. Have you heard of the work of Derrick Lonsdale? Some articles. He also wrote some very interesting books.
https://hormonesmatter.com/the-wrong-fork-understanding-the-current-medical-model/
https://hormonesmatter.com/western-medicine-house-built-sand/
https://hormonesmatter.com/dysautonomia-hypoxia/
Haven't heard of him, but looking at it briefly looks like total quackery as per usual.
Here's why.
The advice "live a healthy life" is known to all, prescribed by doctors 100% of the time, totally ignored, and incredibly hard to intervene in. "You are missing some common sense lifestyle intervention X" is included within things like "eat a healthy diet for fucks sake." The few people who grab onto something (like thiamine or whatever) tend to ignore all else including extremely important medical intervention (fun fact: Steve Jobs died from one of the more survivable pancreatic cancers because he refused mainstream medicine). Outcomes in "healthstyle fad" type people tend to be incredibly bad, and then we see them avoidably dying in the hospital for no reasons with something preventable and demanding last second intervention.
Admittedly nutritional type interventions like OP's comment are a bit trickier because establishing evidence burden is hard, but that's not really what your link is getting at.
I work in software and academia. The idea that the best solutions win was something i believed in until i started to observe things a bit more critically. Now it just seems like a laughable statement. A reason for this is that certain things are extremely complicated, which makes measurements on how well something works, or will work in the future, difficult. Add in the fact that most people are good at following processes, not building coherent models of something that's hard to see, but is none the less real. What you get seems to be a certain kind of system that sort of works if you don't zoom out enough. Why do we have 5 guys solving the problems that are created by another 5 guys? It's just patches upon patches upon patches. And eventually the system gets stuck in a local (hopefully) maximum.
I would assume medicine works similarly, but since everything is even harder to measure there, and the fact that as you said, patients suck. The default should therefore be that nothing works even close to as well as it should. I have IBD along with extreme fatigue. Conventional medicine does not really have a solution to this. To combat this I've changed up my diet in multitude of ways. I saw the most improvements using Carnivore, to the point where it felt unbelievable, but it introduced other problems so it was not sustainable. So if Carnivore, a very "woo" thing with a hint of "bro-science" works well. What other things that are deemed "woo" actually works?
I tried a bunch of things, most did nothing, some had temporary positives, some negatives. Some, like folinic acid has minor but long term positive improvements. But I swear that something about B1 therapy that that Doctor proposed worked, in the sense that it's solving the problem. I've been a lurker on the internet my entire life, simply because it's never been worth the effort to type without a clear reward (money from work), but now writing feels easy and fun. Another, more objective measurement is that my hamstring/hip mobility has gone from -2 to almost normal. I can almost touch my toes now. I've attempted to fix this problem for 5+ years through PT and exercise. Nothing had any impact before.
Here's a study that I found, there are more if one looks around. Indicating it improves things in all kinds of problems https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33210299/. As another anecdote is that it also worked for my girlfriend with her POTS. First it made the symptoms a lot worse, then much better. And it improved her anxiety massively. His book also attempts to explain the science behind it. It would be interesting if those explanations also sound like woo since I don't have enough knowledge to know if they are wrong.
But if you think about it, different nutrients do different things in the body. It makes certain processes work faster / slower depending on what is available. If say fighting a virus needs certain nutrients, unless proof that we have enough, the reasonable assumtion is that more of these nutrients will help in that fight right?
If you have some good arguments that this is the wrong path to go down on I'd be very happy to hear it, since I'm still skeptical despite the fact that it's obviously working for me. I mean if there is something real here, and "real" medicine does not touch it, the "woo's" are the only ones that will.
Thanks for your time!
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Speaking as someone whose mother's go-to crazy for disease and illness was that magical eating would make all things better, I just want to second this skepticism. Diet and nutritional supplements did not cure my little brother's ADHD, diet and nutritional supplements did not cure my father's dementia and Alzheimer's, my own diet and (lack of) nutritional supplements did not cause my acute appendicitis when I had that, etc.
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