A Cure For What Ails Me

Meniere’s has no known cause. If your symptoms can be traced to a cause then you technically don’t have Meniere’s anymore. You’ve got whatever that other thing is called instead. It is the nature of the disease that finding a cause for some group of sufferers removes them from the pool who don’t have an explanation for their symptoms. There is no official procedure for this getting done, it is simply the way these things work out on the ground, where people like you and me and everyone reading this simply have to cope with our daily challenges. It’s all most of us can do.

The bandaid problem is why people reject modern medicine and decry big pharma as creating classes of people who are shackled to thier treatments, instead of finding a cure. They don’t understand that manufacturers largely serve the demands of consumers. Big pharma would love to drive demand the way that conspiracy fantasist have nightmares about, but individuals are fickle and hard to predict. It is very tempting to point to people just wanting an answer and to be made comfortable afterwards as not understanding what could actually be possible with real answers and real cures. But they hurt and they are confused, and they just want to stop hurting. To have that answer.

Continue reading “A Cure For What Ails Me”

Medicine & Chronic Illness

Doctors are stuffy. Their education and experience lead them to be more confident in their methods and results than they should be, and patients not getting better is a challenge to everything that they believe in. It isn’t their fault, but like everyone else that fails at their goals, they think it is.

There is always room for improvement and this goes double for medicine’s approach to the chronically ill. They need to admit up front that they can’t cure us, yes. However, most people’s ideas about alternative medicine and treatment are ritualistic at best and actively harmful at worst.

My mother insisted I needed to ingest diatomaceous earth for my stomach problems. Her alternative medicine research had lead her to this conclusion. Her research method? Put the treatment in the patient’s hand and measure the strength in that arm. This is a common practice in alternative medicine and that’s just one example. I have dozens of examples of alternative medicine craziness that I’ve just never published stories about.

Nothing that alternative medicine has ever suggested to me, none of the home remedies I’ve ever tried have done more for me than my own dogged trial and error run through every medicine available over the counter. My willingness to try new prescriptions.

I’ll take stuffy doctors over pseudo-science any day. I just change doctors if I feel the one I’m seeing isn’t taking me seriously. For me, dentistry is just this side of quackery anyway. Temporomandibular joint disorder is a thing though. So I will give that diagnosis a wide latitude for the sake of those who find relief in treatment for it.

reddit.com/r/Menieres

Long Haul COVID

spotifyVox – Unexplainable – The viral ghosts of long Covid

Covid-19 appears to be one of many infections, from Ebola to strep throat, that can give rise to stubborn symptoms in an unlucky subset of patients. “It is more typical than not that a virus infection leads to long-lasting symptoms in some fraction of individuals,” Iwasaki said.

In this week’s episode of Unexplainable, we dive into what we know about long Covid and what other viruses can teach us about the condition, including the leading hypotheses for what might be driving symptoms in Covid long-haulers.

Vox

I suspect that Long Haul is a syndrome like most sufferers understand Meniere’s to be; a group of symptoms that have divergent causes. It is the only way to explain the varied treatment outcomes. The people who don’t find relief from being vaccinated for SARS-Cov2 probably do have an immune system problem and not reservoirs of the virus. It is entirely likely that both causes are simultaneously true for different sufferers.

Meniere’s treatments that I find give me relief do cause worse symptoms for other sufferers. Different causes is the most likely explanation for these results.

From a letter to Vox

More than half of the 236 million people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 worldwide since December 2019 will experience post-COVID symptoms — more commonly known as “long COVID” — up to six months after recovering, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. The research team said that governments, health care organizations and public health professionals should prepare for the large number of COVID-19 survivors who will need care for a variety of psychological and physical symptoms.

sciencedaily h/t to SGU #849