Seth’s blog

This comment was made recently on an earlier post:

I am so glad I found this blog.

My daughter has had coughing fits for 24 months (she’s 5 1/2 yo).

Inhalers, several doctors, nothing helped. She routinely coughed until vomiting. After one 10 hour coughing fit I reached my limit and scoured the web.

After putting in her whole medical history as search qualifiers I found this [post]. The prior eczema and antibiotics were key indicators.

After 3 days of drinking 1 probiotic shake a day, she showed very marked improvement. After 1 week, no symptoms. This is a girl who’s been unable to run and play for 2 years. Who woke up coughing and gagging most nights.

After 6 weeks of the same regimen, she still shows no symptoms and is running and playing full blast.

The pulmonary specialist discounts the results we’ve seen as a fluke . . . we’ll see. Previously my daughter’s lung capacity was measured at 47% of expected.

“Unable to run and play for 2 years”! I’m impressed. Not only (a) the improvement is huge, but also (b) it resembles verification of a prediction, not just something a theory can explain, (c) it wasn’t obvious to “several doctors” or (d) the rest of the Internet, and (e) after it happened it was dismissed by an expert, even though the evidence for causality is excellent. The verification aspect reminds me of Pale Fire:

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

• the I Practice My Own Methods Developed From Self-Experimentation group. Which, when this was written, had one member. She has Parkinson’s Disease and found that yoga helps. “I started watching yoga on tv because [my husband] had the tv on and he likes to watch attractive women expressing themselves physically.”
• umami basics. “Maturation increases the content of umami.”
• reasonable talk about addiction by Gabor Mate, a Vancouver doctor. “The first time I took heroin, it felt like a warm soft hug.” Mate says his addiction to classical CDs was like a heroin addiction. Sure, you laugh, he says, and goes on to say that one weekend he spent $8,000 on classical CDs, that his wife could tell when he’d been classical-CD shopping, and he once neglected a woman in labor (he was an obstetrician) because he was buying classical CDs. “In effect, our system punishes and prosecutes people for having been abused in the first place.”

Thanks to Bob Levinson.

Gut And Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) is a book by Natasha Campbell-McBride about how to treat allergies, autism, and similar conditions.  In this entry, Cheeseslave talks about her own son and then quotes another mother about the effects of the GAPS diet (plus other changes) on her autistic son.

Kevin lacked oxygen at birth, so in the first year of life, I already saw that he was not developing like my other kids (he is our 5th). His motor skills lagged and he cried a lot, didn’t sleep so well, etc.At two, his behavior was just not right. He never responded right to correction, would throw things in anger or frustration, cried all the time, especially when waking up, basically never happy. He didn’t walk until two and then he would fall down constantly.

He also began to always be starving. When he was really hungry, his face would get distorted and frozen in a strange way. I now think he was having seizures of sorts.

We did not vaccinate at all and we figured out that if we fed him lots of protein type foods like meats, he would relax his body and face and be able to go play for a bit until it happened all over again in a short time.

I do think that because we didn’t vaccinate and figured out to keep feeding him this way, we were able to “coast along” like this for years. He had learning disabilities, lacked social skills and continued to have autistic traits like sensory issues, hiding under blankets, reacting to sounds, not liking people around, rigid in routines, and spinning and going on his head along with head banging.

Long story shorter, we did get a diagnosis of Aspergers at one point. We took him to doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist to no avail. He also strangely was NEVER once sick (we later learned that his immune system was not working a bit).

At 9 years old, he got pneumonia, followed by asthma and allergies. His eating [problems] had escalated to the point of feeding him every 20-30 minutes or he would have gigantic meltdowns. We eventually could not even have people over.

He was given an inhaler for the asthma and suddenly, without us making the connection, he began to not respond when called, became extremely hyperactive and began to run away at all hours of the day and night requiring police to find him and being very dangerous. (we once lost him in the middle of downtown Chicago). He would also try to jump out of moving vehicles, out of windows and required constant restraining.

The seizures got bad, he would fall down the stairs and lose consciousness several times per day. They tried psych drugs and he almost died twice from his reaction to them (I am now grateful that we couldn’t go that route).

We became so desperate that we brought him home from hospital and got deadbolts to keep him from running, did all our own restraining and called alternative docs to help us.

We began kefir and diet from nutritionist (basically a BED [Body Ecology Diet]/GAPS version), took him off inhaler. His allergies were totally out of control, he could barely open his eyes from swelling, and his chin was deformed and swollen, his belly too, his whole body. He would only eat junk food and fast foods and it was incredibly difficult to transition him to the diet.

The DAN (Defeat Autism Now) protocols we followed, made him worse in lots of ways b/c the chelation made him extremely violent, the B12 shots kept him awake for nights on end without any sleep, the antifungals and all those other interventions were nightmarish for him.

Eventually, I resolved to use only foods and do this without any kind of doctors. So for this past year, I researched and researched and was determined to bring him back from this state. We have done a combo of GAPS (and BED) very successfully along with lots of fermented foods and drinks.

The allergies and asthma are 100% gone, the seizures we have had only one in 65 days and very mild (compared to 5-10 per day). He sings every morning and has cried once in the last 2.5 months (he used to cry for 1-3 hours at a time each day) and he can go outside again without running away. He is in martial arts, acting appropriately at church, having eye contact, no autistic traits of late and learning academics after two years of not being able to open a book. He reads before bed at an 8th grade level.

This story has many interesting elements. 1. Huge improvement. Very plausible that it’s due to the dietary change. 2. Autism and allergies go away at the same time, suggesting same cause. 3. Treatment with fermented foods. 4. A different “radical” solution failed, meaning there is no reason to think this is a placebo effect. 5. The mystery of why an inhaler made things worse. 6. Autism not due to vaccination.

A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

Researchers in the new study identified 81 people, ages 13 to 25, with warning signs of psychosis, including sleeping much more or less than usual, growing suspicious of others, believing someone is putting thoughts in their head or believing they have magical powers. Forty-one were randomly assigned to take four fish oil pills a day for three months. The other patients took dummy pills.

After a year of monitoring, 2 of the 41 patients in the fish oil group, or about 5%, had become psychotic, or completely out of touch with reality. In the placebo group, 11 of 40 became psychotic, about 28%.

The study is impressive not only because it uses ordinary food (fish oil) rather than  dangerous drugs (such as Prozac) but also because it studies prevention. Just as the ketogenic diet suggests a widespread animal-fat deficiency, so this study suggests a widespread omega-3 deficiency, which won’t surprise any reader of this blog. Completing the picture — I believe most Americans eat far too little animal fat, omega-3, and fermented food — baker’s yeast is being studied as a cure for cancer.

Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Chris.

Carl Willat pointed me to this press release about some remarkable research:

Treatment of mice with a ‘friendly’ bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience. . . . 

Interest in the project arose after human cancer patients being treated with the bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae unexpectedly reported increases in their quality of life.

I believe we need a substantial daily intake of microbes (in our food) to be healthy. The obvious microbe-produced improvements are in immune function and digestion. But this study and the research on which it’s based suggest we also need microbes to make our nervous systems work properly.

When I started eating lots of fermented food I did notice an improvement in mood. Not dramatic, but clear. On a trip to Boston last year, I thought: I’ll go without fermented foods to see what it’s like. But after a day or so without them, I felt so bad I stopped the experiment. A friend of mine says something similar, that kombucha improves his mood in a way that doesn’t seem to be due to caffeine.

I asked Carl how he learned about a three-year-old press release. (The research article — gated version here — appeared in 2007.) “Neil Gaiman tweeted about it,” he said.