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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I'm one of the unlucky newbs that had his entire account wiped last night. Anyway, I'll open with a mystery for you biologically-minded guys
For about ~10 years now, I've had this issue where I'm generally healthy, but some chemicals don't seem to be flowing right, and so I've lived in a state of sorta-permanent emotional numbness and pleasure deficiency. I've seen many doctors and psychs and none figured out what's going on. Well, I myself had no idea until last year when a few amazing discoveries happened, and I made some theories. I did an experiment where I'd go out, do some intense cardio for an hour, then go back inside, drink tons of coffee and eat sugary snacks, and relax with a fan. Within a few hours some of the symptoms subsided -- symptoms which no antidepressant or antipsychotic could touch. So I took this discovery online and the response was predictable: Everyone agreed that it was the cardio. To me though this was dubious. I had done lots of cardio before and it had no effect, so why now? I believed the fan played a crucial role, but also understood that was odd. Why would a fan improve these symptoms?
Well, several months later I have the answer. It wasn't the fan that improved the symptoms, but the way I positioned my body when I used the fan! After working out, I would slink down my chair out of exhaustion so that my torso was almost parallel with the floor, with my head against the back of the chair, and then use the fan. After exercising, or drinking coffee, or eating sugary snacks or a carb-heavy meal, if I recline like that, before long my symptoms magically start to fade. I regain the ability to smell, my skin is more sensitive, colors are brighter, etc. This would be a miracle, but there's one problem: insomnia. After just one day of doing this, my sleep is worse. By night 3, sleep is near impossible.
Also, depending on the routine I used, different symptoms would improve. On my cardio-heavy routine, I regained the ability to enjoy music, whereas if I sit in my room and chug a lot of coffee, bodily sensitivity (like sense of smell) increases instead. Further, there seems to be no limit on what I can regain from these methods. The cardio method began with increased music enjoyment, but spread to other forms of pleasure after a couple days. When I stopped all methods, all gains also disappeared.
So that's the mystery. I'm no scientist, but my first guess is something blood or circulation related. Lying supine decreases the effect of gravity which apparently helps blood return to the heart. Gut microbes play a major role in producing both neurotransmitters and our sense of smell. But why would gravity affect this process? And why insomnia? It's all really mysterious. So yeah, ideas welcome! I'm afraid until I discover the mechanism at work here, progress is impossible
This reminds me of this person with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. He received a Halo to hold his head up and went from bedridden to energetic rather quickly.
Having a rare problem definitely changes how you see the medical world. Not in a pessimistic way though. More like, it's amazing our protocols work as well as they do. If you have a toothache, any doctor can give you a painkiller + antibiotic and the problem will just vanish. That guy's story kinda paints ordinary doctors in a bad light, but if there is no protocol for solving your problem, then doctors aren't really prepared to help. This criticism gets levied against psychiatrists a lot, but doctors operate the same way -- they just appear better because doctor protocols are much more advanced. Medical consensus has taught our doctors everything they know, so when it comes to fringe issues like ME which aren't acknowledged by the medical world, it only seems right to defer to consensus and ignore it too rather than go out on a limb & explore.
Rather than blaming ordinary doctors for doing their job, I think we need a better pipeline established between rare-disease-sufferers and genuine medical researchers. The problem is that for every person with a genuinely rare problem, there's probably 10+ people who fit neatly into a pre-established disease category, who constantly badger medical workers that they're different. That's why the doctors in that guy's story are so dismissive, they deal with this shit non-stop. Right now there's no simple way to prove you're a genuine outlier. Maybe there is and I missed it.
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