People will try to identify with you, or laugh that its just “the onset of middle age”, but (you just know) that thing that keeps happening to you, for hours, days or weeks at a time, is so much more than just forgetting someone’s name or misplacing your car-keys. When you are in fibro-fog, it is as though you are slowly losing your mental faculties from the base up and it feels insidious and profound. It also feels, somehow, like your head is being squeezed or compressed, like you want to shake it to get all the parts to fall into the right places again. You can see words hanging there but can’t reach for them, your can’t organise your thoughts enough to set action into motion, you feel disengaged and unable to relate to people in direct communication, like you are watching them through a fogged window, your mind wanders like you are half-asleep, ordinary things startle you, you pedal in mid-air to get a foothold on you priorities and what you (dimly) thought you were meant to do today, though the remembrance of whatever that was floats like a ghost in the air. It can feel humiliating, frustrating and deeply upsetting on so many levels.
This last twenty-four hours alone, deep in fibro-fog as I am (and have been since the extreme head pains of three days ago), I’ve found myself in pieces more than once at the ‘little’ things I can’t manage to do or to process. For instance, I’ve had the owner of the house next-door pop round to see me, my husband announcing “look who’s here!” and her waving at me gaily saying “Hi Helen, how are you?” and all the time I’m looking at her with a face like a startled guppy fish, panicking my way through people-options like a visual rolodex in my mind, shape-sorting them to her face to try and place who is standing there in my doorway yet failing miserably to do so until she points at the house next door. What was almost more shocking to me was how people from the far distant past of my life – people I no longer know – presented as candidates to my mind quicker than the neighbour I last saw just a few months ago and consider to be a ‘friend’ – but such (and I’m so sorry for my confusion, if you happen to read this Sarah) is the nature of fibro-fog; I was caught unawares and my brain cells failed to deliver.
This morning’s highlight was a frustratedly-teary conversation with the online supermarket who deliver my shopping because they ‘can’t’ import my saved shopping lists across to the new email account I set up, which means I won’t have any prompts to remind me what I normally buy when I do my weekly shopping; something which daunts me beyond explaining to anyone without fibro-fog going on. These prompts, systems and mechanisms that I’ve set up for myself – like my supplements neatly counted out in pill organisers labelled with days of the week, time of the day – are my survival mechanisms hard-earned after a decade of diving in and out of these wearisome spells. The irony is that, without these systems in place, the worse times only spiral into a deteriorated state of health as missed supplements and ad-hoc shopping lead to compromised diet and lack of self-care. The other foible of my morning was that I have allowed myself to stiffen into cold-induced pain due to ‘not realising’ the heating had been switched off at the controller when I turned the thermostat up – a lack of cognition that makes me tut at myself and yet I can hardly navigate around the simplest pitfalls and cues when I am like this. It makes every ordinary thing – even getting in my car to drive down the road – the most unwieldy challenge; not that I can’t drive a car (that bit comes easily) but that I don’t remember why I’m doing it. I lose count of how often I find myself driving along the road like I ‘just landed there’ from space and can’t work out what road I am on or where I’m meant to be going. This is all very real and typical ‘fibro-fog’ experience and it can straddle itself between frustrating and downright scary to be in it.
It can be all the more frustrating for the fact it ebbs and flows – for me, with the seasons – so after a long clarity-driven summer of feeling, mentally, normal and even optimal, I find I am suddenly back in this ‘old’ territory, raking through my own head in search of my brain-cells, feeling intellectually spongy, unfocused, my mind wandering, my intentions gone to pot. Thinking I was way beyond all this and well into my recovery, I had lined-up quite an autumn for myself; planned a couple of courses, arranged some long-overdue Skype calls, socials with friends, plans to explore all-new territory in my work and new opportunities exhibiting – all things I feel I can’t, and don’t want to, progress now that my mental coherence feels so scattered on the winds – in fact, the thought of engaging with anything outside the safety of my tiniest routine makes me want to sob with the overwhelm. Even an evening meeting at my daughter’s school has me pricking tears at the thought of the challenge of it. I missed my own ‘private view’ last week, for goodness sake, because even if I could have managed the night-time drive to the gallery and the standing around in so much pain, I felt sure I couldn’t have managed the small talk with ‘clients’. Hard not to drop into self-pity when this comes around again; hard, at least, not to feel the double whammy of disappointment as an expanding life shuts down to its smallest size once more. People that say “snap out of it” or “just plan things anyway, get out more, and you’ll probably be OK” aren’t getting how real and all-consuming this is when its there.
This, in many ways, is the worst aspect of fibromyalgia as I have experienced it over the years. Physical pain is one thing and yes, really horrible but its gruelling, seriously tough territory for anyone to feel so intellectually handicapped when its not their norm; especially so for someone who has always prided themselves on sharp intellect and adept social skills, on being articulate and pithy. For some reason, I can still express myself – like this – in writing from fibro-fog corner (in fact, its often my outlet) but direct speech disintegrates completely and so I withdraw inside myself until the phase is over, doing my level-best to keep my spirits up, going on gentle walks and spending time in the garden but, mainly, focussed on recovery.
So, (I can promise you) it was no morbid tendency or hypochondriac urge that made me watch ‘Still Alice’ at the weekend but it was certainly right on topic. Its true that, no, fibromyalgia isn’t Alzheimer’s, and isn’t progressive – BUT there is a lot of cross-over territory and something told me I would find it interesting and helpful to watch this gritty account of a fifty-something woman with early onset Alzheimer’s. This character, Alice, was also a bright and intellectual woman with everything going for her before Alzheimer’s happened – a world-renowned doctor of linguistics, no less – and so the deterioration of her mental faculties to where she can no longer recognise her own children makes painful watching and yet (with a brilliant performance from…oh god, what’s her name…I’m having to look this up and yet I only watched the film yesterday…yes, Julianne Moore) the film really made a profound mark on me and really did help to crystallise some of the thoughts I am having on this mental aspect of fibromyalgia.
There are so…so…many moments in the early part of this movie that I identified with, breath held at the macabre horror of watching the truth of myself in a fibro-fog state played back at me on the screen. There’s the lost phone found in the freezer (yes, I’ve done that); the information she is asked to memorise and repeat back by the specialist (I found I couldn’t recall it either); the meaningful people she still can’t remember meeting; the jogging-trip when – for a significant while – she can’t recognise where she is, though she’s right outside her own place of work; the frustration at being told by well-meaners “don’t be silly, this can’t be happening to you, you’re far too young/bright/healthy” and “its OK, I forget things all the time too; only the other day…bla bla bla” yet knowing this is something more, something alarming and calling to be taken seriously.
Then, like me, she throws everything she’s got at it, applies her whole considerable intellect at approaching the situation intelligently – in her case, preparing text messages, instructional videos and tests for herself; in mine, researching this thing relentlessly, wading through science and endless anecdotes searching for clues to my own recovery. The gift in watching the film was realising the differences in our circumstances because it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been into the depths of fibro-fog over the past decade, I’ve always come out of it again and some of the times in-between have seemed all the more dazzlingly coherent and crystal clear for it (or maybe I just learned to appreciate them more).
Because, somewhere between having molten pools of candle-wax for brains I am gripping resolutely to those patterns that are brightly shining out for me like veritable wicks of light leading my own way out of the maze of it. There are certain patterns that I am discerning so clearly now and, rudimentary though they are, I’m going to share them here, in their half-baked form, in the hope that someone in a position to tie off the threads will do so, that it might help to catalyse somebody’s processing or stimulate the next bit of research or another fibro-fog person’s intention to try some of the solutions that I am feeling my way through and then finding it helps.
I spoke in my last post about excitotoxicity and glutamate and, somewhere beneath the surface of writing that, I was already pondering about the undeniable link between that and ‘diet’. Since then, I came across a brilliant resource that draws a very distinct connection between modern diet and excitotoxicity; specifically, in relation to four common factors in modern diet – gluten, soy, corn and casein (from milk). These are labelled the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ by Dogtor J in his website (see his post ‘A brief history of the big four’) dedicated to exploring their effect on human – and animal – health. He even makes ironic fun of these ingredients for the fact they have something in common – they are all used to make glue! Literally, they glue to our insides, causing damage to the villi in our gut – essential for our proper absorption of nutrients – which is the ‘villous atrophy’ that is found at the root of celiac disease. His G.A.R.D. diet is a glutamate and aspartic acid elimination plan and the results he shares make very interesting reading in light of what I had to say about glutamate in my last post. Rather then regurgitate all of this, I refer you to the vast pool of resources he has put together over there on his food intolerance website – I certainly poured over it for a few hours and have taken some of it to heart as it rings so soundly with what I have already come to know about the glutomate factor.
This set me off on the route of exploring the profound connection from stomach to brain (and back again) and what I kept coming up with was the vagus nerve. Well, after all, as one of the marketers of MSG (that man-created ‘food-enhancer’, mono-sodium glutamate) proudly boast on their website, the marvellous effect of their ‘food’ is that it stimulates and excites the vagus nerve – or, in other words, sends happy signals to the brain – which is why it ‘tastes so good’. Well, yes, but if you’re already in a state of excitotoxicity, how quickly does such a concentrated product send you way over the top? And its not that I, knowingly, eat any food containing MSG these days but what I hadn’t been allowing myself to own is how often it is dressed up as ‘yeast extract’ or ‘natural seasonings’ and, additionally, how the many food sources of glutamic acid – and that includes anything containing gluten – can do the very same thing. Where it is being used as a flavour enhancer, a synthetically produced glutamate or ‘free’ glutamate (that is, one that is not bound to any other molecules, unlike the way that it occurs in nature) can be added to a food at levels as high as 75% without any mention of MSG on the labelling.
Then, according to Dogtor J and plenty of other sources, bound glutamates have the same overall effect on our health and it doesn’t surprise me to hear that being in a family where, out of our two children, one is celiac and the other gluten-sensitive, both under the age of twenty and from a family where we eat very well indeed. The food sources richest in natural glutamate are the gluten grains – wheat, barley and rye – followed by dairy products, beans and legumes (particularly soy and peanut), nuts and seeds. Just think back to a time when a meal eaten before bed woke you up with a start in the early hours of the morning and you’ve probably nailed a glutamate-containing food source that took a little longer than MSG to filter through. Maybe ‘only some people’ are being affected by this form of glutamate (as many as one in three, however, is the expert guess…) but then our group sensitivity to it seems to be on the rise and we’ve all heard the heated arguments about wheat production, how the current wheat that is such a staple in our diet bears no resemblance to Nature’s version and how it is destroying western health. So has our over-consumption of this massively tampered-with grain affected our overall tolerance of even naturally occurring glutamate? Whatever the ’cause’, Dogtor J found that, in the case of dog’s in his surgery, he could halt epileptic seizures within 48 hours by starting them on a gluten-free diet and then, he learned, the very same pattern has been found in humans. This is where he began piecing all of his information together with his own inexplicable pain and brain-fog and learned how to address them – through change of diet.
So what and where is the vagus nerve – that’s an interesting area of exploration because of what it throws up into the limelight. The vagus (like the psoas muscle – another territory I’ve thoroughly enjoyed looking into) is one of those special ‘places’ in the physical body that seem to serve as some sort of communication link between our physical and emotional selves (or, lets take it deeper, our physical and spiritual aspects); in science-speak, a gateway between the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems. Our longest nerve, it extends from the brain to the stomach, winding and wiggling around several key landmarks including the throat along the way (ever had that lumpy, tight-throat feeling when you feel triggered because that’s your vagus telling you something). What really got my attention is that – while over-stimulation is an issue – it actually likes to be stimulated or, I would say, to hold a steady hum or vibration (I imagine this being a tuneful signature tone; one that we play to our own cells and beyond when we are in our healthiest, most in-balance, universe-resonant selves). This is such a truism that vagus nerve stimulation is being used as the latest experimental therapy for recovery from strokes, epilepsy, depression, Alzheimer’s….and it didn’t take me very long to find an article entitled ‘Reborn – reversing Fibromyalgia with Vagus Nerve Stimulation’, amongst others on this topic. However, as anyone with fibromyalgia knows to a tee, there can always be too much of a ‘good thing’ and when something becomes over-stimulated to the point of excitotoxicity, it can wear out, break down or self-destruct altogether.
Importantly, the vagus nerve has taught us that its signals flow – not just from the brain to other parts of the body but – from the stomach (or, the solar plexus) to the brain, with this centre having quite a say on what information the brain is receiving and how it interprets ‘what is going on’. About ninety per cent of the signals handled by the vagus nerve are generated, not from ‘above’ but at the boot-camp of the Enteric Nervous System (located in the gastrointestinal system), which is sometimes described as being a second brain.
This says a great deal about how and why the stomach is the emotion gauge of the body, acting as the sensory interface of ‘physical body meets wellbeing’ and why we feel whether something is ‘right’, is a ‘good choice’ or whether we are ‘safe’, via a gut feeling, even before our brain gets involved. When one end of that nerve is so perfectly positioned – in the gut – as to be able to deliver early warning of a toxic overload on the horizon, straight from the front-line of a stomach that is being bombarded with gluten, MSG, aspartame and any other ‘invaders’ of the over-stimulating variety, its not hard to see how the messenger (the vagus nerve) ‘gets shot’ or, at least, becomes chronically weary of delivering the same old messages, even to the point of crashing altogether. When our gut is insisting ‘all is not well’ and we fail to listen, how much more readily does this crash happen. Simplistic as this hypothesis – quite deliberately – is, you hopefully see my point.
When you look at how many over-stimulating food sources are incorporated into modern diet (quite aside from how many over-stimulating experiences we pack into our modern lifestyle…) is it any wonder that excitotoxicity is being touted as the base-note of everything from ADHA to eczema to MS to fibromyalgia to strokes to epileptic seizures to Alzheimer’s. Leaky gut, free-radical damage and inflammation are other common themes across all of these – how many different ways does do our bodies have to keep sending us the same message? Just take your pick of any of these conditions and Google them alongside keywords ‘excitotoxicity’ and ‘glutamate’ and just see how much comes up for you – it was enough information for me to pour over for three days or more and still feel there’s so much more to look into.
Back to that vagus nerve, if its happy state is a gentle vibration like the soft reverberation of a harp-string but we pound and pound it like the wire of an electric guitar playing thrash metal, what are we going to get in the end? I’ll leave you to ponder that and move onto the next sub-topic that really interested me.
In fact, it was that film again – ‘Still Alice’ – that got me looking into the amyloid brain-plaque that builds up in the case of Alzheimer’s and this took me off along the route of reading about glial cells. I confess to having known very little about glial cells before this weekend and any wonder given they have, largely, been played down for about the last two hundred years. Their very name means ‘glue’ (an ironic misnomer given what I just said about the four food triggers above), which is pretty much all they were considered to be – a sort of filling – until recent studies started to show they were a whole lot more important than that. In fact, the job they do is quite incredible – described as octopus-like in their structure, they have the capability to rush to the aid of nerves in crisis and, literally, wrap their ‘limbs’ around the damage, plugging any holes or shortfalls in communication; in short, they repair, they regenerate and seem to be Jack-of-all-trades. In fact, what they seem to be – and this really got my attention – are a sort of ‘energetic’ co-pilot alongside the more work-a-day neurons they collaborate with and this is because glial cells respond to geomagnetic pulses and communicate with each other via chemical signals which allows resonant glial cells to send and receive messages instantly in a way that sounds much more akin to pulsing ‘radio’ waves than the typical way that nerves communicate, which is by a sort of electrical relay system.
In my mind’s eye, nerves are like over-land snail mail to glial cells’ satellite and this would explain an awful lot about the immediacy of certain responses generated by information at one end of the human nervous system relayed to another in, seemingly, no time at all. For me, it sheds a very particular light on why geomagnetic activity (the ‘space weather’ that I’ve talked about so much before) has such a huge impact on my health and how I register this in my body even before it, technically, impacts the earthfield; I literally feel it in my cells ‘as it happens’. It also begs the question, how much are EMFs from mobile phones and WiFi, etc., messing wit, and overwhelming, our cells and tipping them into an additional form of excitotoxicity. Again, here you have the physical body being far more ‘tuned in’ to its environment – in the very broadest sense – than scientists have typically acknowledged until recently.
So if a ‘system’ is already overwhelmed and tending to be over-excitable for whatever reason (the typical person with fibromyalgia starts with a peak event in their health, emotions or circumstances – epigenetics at work – turning that particular gene expression of excitotoxicity on), then a continued bombardment of triggers in the form of particular food substances delivering a surfeit of glutamate into a system that is already too overloaded to cope and probably failing to generate sufficient natural antagonists (such as GABA) to counter the bombardment, could prove to be the factor that perpetuates the crisis for longer than it should take to run its course. Glial cells will be doing their level best to mitigate and repair but if way too much is going on – both inside and outside the body – these will also be sent into overdrive, literally hopping around like the building is burning down and mixing their messages all over the place and at super-speed too. I somehow know that the unique type of excruciating head pressure, migraine headache – though ‘headache’ never feels like an adequate word – and inflammation that I experience, for hours or even days (often just prior to an episode of brain fog and, many times, triggered by solar flare or geomagnetic storm) is related to this over-activation of glial cells who are, after all, only trying to do their job as best they can in the circumstances.
Add to this that the vagus nerve, weary of endlessly delivering ‘news’ that can’t be adequately dealt with – since neutrons and glial cells in the brain are already struggling to cope – stops ‘humming’ its happy tune altogether; not a good outcome since the vagus regulates breathing, maintains equilibrium and prevents inflammation. Its easy to hypothesise that its breakdown could have something to do with the many illnesses that are versions of chronic inflammation and no surprise that MANY neurological illnesses are suspected to start in the gut and then spread to the brain, via the vagus nerve – which, you could say, is the very moment that health equilibrium is lost. It is also, no doubt, why stimulation of the vagus nerve is proving to be of such universal interest in so many fields of therapeutic treatment.
So, what if we never had to get to the point where it breaks-down in the first place; how do we avoid that circumstance repeating itself so broadly across all our health-patterns (Dogtor J quotes figures that claim one in thirty Americans is gluten intolerant; one in three gluten sensitive…most without realising it) and increasingly, with ever younger people showing signs of being affected?
What seems to play out over and over again, in so many guises, is that systemic-overwhelm results from too much ‘outside’ stimuli (stress, vaccinations, diet, environment) and, initially, this may present as bowel issues or even chronic widespread pain as excitotoxicity turns up every single sensory experience to the highest possible volume to get our attention (as per my last post). Then this overwhelm state – if not addressed – graduates to where it becomes a ‘brain’ event played out in the territory of neurones and glial cells, of intellect and day-to-day memory retention, social skills, coherence, schoolwork and job capacity, self-esteem and the fundamental ability to function as a ‘normal’ person living to your true potential. What you have here, in essence, is the classic fibromyalgia all-consuming ‘CRASH’ and, for others – with a slight variable in their epigenetics – the story may turn into one of a number of related and far more tragic scenarios, Alzheimer’s included. Different though they are (and, for my own part, I am grateful to learn these two have no significant comorbidity) I suspect these many, scattered, conditions spark from remarkably similar ‘triggers’ and the thing, resoundingly, in common is ‘the modern way of life’, including what we eat, how we live, all we lose touch with, the stresses, fears and the resultant systemic overwhelm. In my mind, it becomes a one + one + one scenario (one is an agravant, more than two at a time can tip the balance and three is over the top) so, once set up to be triggered, a change in seasons (affecting serotonin levels, amongst other things), a geomagnetic storm plus the wrong diet can be all too much for a person’s system to cope with at any one time – hence my seasonal ‘crash’. Having all-but eliminated the circumstantial stresses relating to lifestyle and even the heavy metal toxins from fillings, I am now left with diet and environmental stressors as the most likely triggers left on the list.
How to mitigate all of this is or, better still , press the re-set button is my next burning question and I’m already onto the job. Yes, it involves significant dietary tweaks – even on top of ALL the original dietary tweaks I had made already because its now time to get serious. No longer enough to be the vegetarian, organic munching home-cook that I am – time to extend the rather laissez faire glance I had given to gluten-reduction into a proper trial of eliminating it altogether. This, for me, included making my first loaf of gluten-free bread at the weekend (as all the commercial brands seem to contain nasties such as caramel for colouring, preservatives, sugar and so on…) and it was more than fine, actually. I’ve had to double-check all my other snack bars and cereals for this, often unexpected, ingredient along with those other questionables – corn, soy and MSG (aspartame has been on my ‘no go’ list for years). It can be a very hard thing to face-up to the fact your presumed vigilance was so amiss that quite a few counts of ‘corn flour’ or ‘yeast extract’ were still making their way into the food-cupboard staples and it was an emotional moment – yes I admit to crying with the frustration of it – to acknowledge that some of my very favourite food, such as tofu and marmite, would have to ‘go’ if I am to take this as seriously as I intend to. Eliminating more of the dairy food that I still enjoy (though I don’t drink milk) is, perhaps, the most daunting thing of all…
The next obvious thing is to take loads of antioxidants – even more of them than before – and I am doing this by adding a super-dose Vitamin C and Rosehip supplement and Selenium to the Olive Leaf Extract that I already take. Taurine, DHA and Grapeseed Extract are also recommended for neutron protection and glial cell support. This whole exercise has made me realise just how crucial the prevention of dangerous levels of inflammation are when it comes to the brain and so I have been coming down on pain episodes with prompt doses of boswellia and curcumin as the most potent natural anti-inflammatories that I know – to good effect.
As for vagus nerve stimulation – the non-medical route – I felt there must be a DIY way of doing this, so I looked around under the heading of ‘yoga’ and found several suggestions, links to which I attach below. Breathing is a very powerful way of stimulating the vegus in the chest cavity and yoga, in general, can be geared at accommodating and nurturing this most important of nerves. Meditation and, particularly, visualisation are powerful tools -especially now I feel like I have got to know my glial cells and vagus nerves a little better – and I intend to work on that relationship in the most visually powerful ways I am capable of from now on.
Mainly, I feel I have a far better ‘structural’ concept of what is happening to my cells to help inform what it feels like is happening to me ‘on the inside’; I actually feel much calmer for having some grasp of what is going on. My take on the vagas nerve and the function it performs is that, as ever, there is so much evidence that we were not designed to operate in isolation or as machines; that the two-directional feedback loop that it serves as is meant to connect all of our parts, both inside the body and beyond. Yes, the vagus seems to love energy – all kinds of energy – whether that be in the form of nutrition (from ‘below’) or the subtler forms that come in at us from the universe (from ‘above’) and with which we are inextricably linked. This feedback loop thrives when it is in flow, in all directions, and it is only when we inadvertently ‘glue’ and ‘overstimulate’ the multi-directional mechanism of it that it backfire on us; the same with the hardworking glial cells whose only intention it is to better inform us as to what is going on all around us, way beyond the outer walls of our physical cells. Certainly, to me, there seems to be a significant ‘solar’ aspect to the way these pieces of apparatus are designed to function; no coincidence, in my mind, that this latest episode of pain and fibro-fog began the very same day the sun became active again after a long quite spell, peaking the day a CME was hurled earthwards (an event which happened at 6am UTC yesterday – at which time I was abruptly woken from deep sleep ‘for no apparent reason’ and then couldn’t get back to sleep). A friend of mine who has ME contacted me today and said she, too, has had a really challenging twenty-four hours and wondered if I was feeling the intense energy. I don’t regard these events as ‘bad’ in any way – in fact, I feel quite sure we are designed to respond to them positively, naturally and in an evolutionary way – only, when our physical bodies have become are ‘glued up’ through the epigenetics of our environment and lifestyle choices, this can become a significant challenge.
Until science gets (I mean really gets) that we are intrinsically connected to the broader universe by our biology then many of these studies into fibromyalgia, seizures, strokes, Alzheimer’s and so on will remain disjoined and piecemeal. Happily there is some evidence of geomagnetic factors being taken into account (for instance, a study entitled ‘Cerebral Pathology and Solar Activity‘ carried out in Bulgaria in 2011 found sufficient correlations between some of the geomagnetic indexes and the cerebral pathology of ischemic and hemorrhagic cerebral infraction to recommend that further extensive studies were warranted). I think the next few years will see our understanding of these correlations, and the bearing they have on so many aspects of human health, expanded way beyond our current ‘textbook’ understanding of the area although when you are ‘in it’ and experiencing it daily, you can’t help but feel that you already have quite the layman’s grasp of something far bigger and more coherent than anyone is telling you.
This is still dust-settling and work-in-progress for me but all it takes is an episode of chronic, disorienting, bewildering brain fog on the scale that I have had this over the weekend – in comparison with how bright-and-sparky I was feeling just a couple of weeks ago – and I am back to feeling very determined to get on top of this, once and for all, and before it becomes any more chronic that it already feels (watching ‘Still Alice’ also drove that home for me). Like most people with fibromyalgia, I am unrelentingly focussed on demanding my complete and active, intellect-sparking and articulate life back – full-time and without compromise, whatever that takes. If you have read this far then you, presumably, feel this way too and I sincerely hope this post informs, inspires or, at least, encourages you in some way.
Useful resources
Dogtor J – Food Intolerance and the Home of G.A.R.D.
“Reborn” – Reversing fibromyalgia through vegus nerve stimulation
The Vagus Nerve and the Healing Promise of The Sudarshan Kriya
What do singing, throats and the vagus nerve have to do with orgasm?
The vagus nerve as a living kundalini serpent
Wake up your vagus nerve and heal your body
The fatigue and pain producers – could glial cells be ‘it’ in chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia?
Unlocking human potential – the rise of the glial cell
Glial cells as an important proliferation matrix in neural communication
Cerebral pathology and solar activity
Living whole 