Saturday, April 16, 2011

new technology and change in supplement regimens

Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that I have been taking an incredible amount of supplements.  To be honest, I had been tiring of doing that, and increasingly wondering whether I was taking the right ones in the right combinations.  Also frankly although I appreciated the information, was feeling bogged down with the BioSet that my practitioner was using, as it felt like we kept getting stuck on things and not making progress.

However, just when I was feeling particularly annoyed, new technology has appeared to address it.  My practitioner has switched to a new system, the Zyto, that is much more sophisticated.

Here's how it works.  The machine reads the electrical impulses of your body systems when you place your hand on a special cradle.  I had a session with it for this first time this past week, and first we started out by choosing my scans.  This is the list of all the things that we will check about my body.  We chose the Chinese medicine meridians, the Chinese medicine five elements, the list of all acupuncture points on the body, environmental toxins, hormones, and a bunch of additional things related to reproductive health such as my thyroid, my uterus, and my ovaries.  The machine then scans all these items, taking a minute or two while your hand is on the cradle.  It then shows a list of which ones are stressed, with a numerical value given to the amount of stress.

The outcome was interesting, the top stressor with a value of -117.33 was Thyroxine, which is the hormone made by the thyroid.  I had had thyroid on my long to-do list as something to explore using the BioSet, but using this new machine we can scan everything at once in just a couple of minutes. Stressors #11 and 14 were also thyroid related. So we uncovered something here very important I think, particularly as thyroid issues are said to be closely related to fibroids, and also to egg quality.

Second on the list is an acupuncture point, but unfortunately can't decipher the code.  #3 and #8 are candida related (ugh we have been working on that for nearly 2 years now!).  Four and five are uterus related.  6 is Dihydrotestosterone, more suggestion that my hormones are a bit out of whack somehow.  #7 is another acupuncture point I'm not sure what it is.  #9 is an acupuncture point on the urinary bladder meridian and #12 is that whole meridian -- interestingly, it's not one we had been focusing on in any of my treatments.  #10 is "yang unresponsive" which I'm not sure what it is, but doesn't sound good. 

So, looks like my thyroid is having issues, and my Candida is causing problems.  My practitioner says she thinks that those are what is behind the fibroids.

There's lots of interesting information in the list of stressors, and of what's not stressed.  I discovered that my liver, gallbladder and spleen meridians were doing just fine, but that my urinary bladder and lung meridians are not so happy. Also issues with lung grief, heart and lung disharmony, kidney fear, heart weakness, and kidney and heart disharmony.  I am going to give this information to my Chi Nei Tsang practitioner, who in addition to the Chi Nei Tsang has been using me as a guinea pig for his new work with Yin-style Bagua meridian stroking technique. He had worked on the spleen, liver, and kidney meridians last week, so that may be why the spleen and liver ones ae doing well.  I also just emailed the Zyto practitioner asking her if the specific acupuncture points that came up as stressed I should be massaging or moxaing or something on my own.

Once one is now all concerned about the stressors, it's time to figure out what to do about them.  My practitioner has input about half of my inventory of different supplement types (it numbered 225!) as well as a bunch of other things that she thought might be helpful for me.  She'll keep adding my other supplements bit by bit to keep adding to my library, and on an ongoing basis I will add anything new prescribed by my acupuncturist, or that I run across that sounds promising (e.g. through the research for this blog).

What the machine then does is run through my supplement library, and looks to see which ones balance the stressors, and which ones make them worse. A numerical value is given to those as well. For example, it seems that the DHEA I was taking was aggravating the stressors, so that is cut out of my regimen for now.

Working with the list of supplements that have a positive impact on the stressors, the practitioner then works to create a combination.  Let me describe how this works. She started with the top supplement on the list, something I have never taken before, called Norival. She then runs it against the stressors, and a graph shows how it calms them down.  Interestingly, the Norival takes the Candida stress down to zero!  Then, she looks at which things are still stressed, and adds additional supplements to address those, each time retesting the combination of all of them against the stressors.  This is important, as in some cases adding an extra supplement causes some of the stressors to rise -- what one wants is for additional supplements to take the stressors down further, otherwise it's not worth adding them. So the art is choosing a combination of supplements that works well together.  This part is manual, and relys on the practitioner's experience and judgement. 

This meant that I have ended up with the following set of supplements, which together took all the stressors down below 10.

Norival 1 cap 2x day
Iron Citrate 1 cap a day
Black currant seed oil, 1 cap 2xday
the two herb formulas prescribed this week by my acupuncturist, except in smaller quantity than he had suggested:  Jia Wei Xiao Yao San 1 teapill 3x day, and Shen Ling Bai Zhu San 1 tablet 3 x day
Karuna CoQ10 1 x day
Cinnamon, 1 teaspoon 2x day
d-pinitol (which I learned about in the Fibroid Miracle book) 1 capsule 2x day

This is certainly a lot less than I had been doing, which is a relief.  I like the scientific way of choosing them, and knowing that we are pinpointing my exact needs.  She also uses the system to imprint the supplements onto a small glass bottle, which I wear against my skin (I put it in my sock). (This something that the BioSet used too).  With this, the treatment starts immediately.  I felt great after the treatment.

I do have a couple of concerns about this process.  One is that by focusing just on stressors and what addresses them, that we might get a whack-a-mole effect by which addressing some stressors leads to aggravating others.  We'll see how much of a problem this becomes.  I am generally going to try to go every 2 weeks, but I have a follow-up appointment next week and at that point should be able to see how much of a problem this is.  What I am hoping will happen though is that even if certain new stressors appear, that over time the number and degree of stressors will go down.  On this first one, I have 2 and a third pages printout of my stressors.  The top one is -117.33 (they are listed by absolute value) and the lowest one on the first page is -52.04, and the second page goes down to 37.71.  That's an awful lot of stressors.  Want to aim at reducing those!  I am a bit worried about the whack-a-mole though, as my body has had some trouble adjusting to the new supplement regimen, kind of energized and tired at the same time, I suspect it's the Norival shaking things up...

The other concern is that now the supplements I am taking are aimed at addressing just the parts of me that are stressed, rather than overall support.  So I am worried that by not taking, for example, a multi-vitamin, that I may not be sufficiently supporting other things and that they then will get out of whack.  But hopefully through overall good diet I will not have too much of a problem with that, and also with every other week monitoring should be able to catch anything like that early. 

This is certainly an interesting new adventure in energy medicine!

2 comments:

Charlie said...

I just found your blog looking for information on fertility and helpful foods. I wonder, without meaning to be rude, has anyone (eg complimentary therapists etc) ever suggested you spend one cycle/month not thinking about your fibroids at all?

I have overcome a major medical problem in the past and I know how all-consuming it can be, so please don't think I'm trying to downplay your very real concerns. But you've been blogging heavily about this for years it seems, and are currently on a regimen that means your mental & emotional energy is focused on the little ~%$$ers every day, and several times at least. Due apologies in advance if you tried this already, but if you were a friend sitting next to me in a coffee shop and mentioned the topic, that would be one thing I'd suggest.

"Energy goes where attention flows" is an old saying with a smidgen of truth: that people who adopt often get pregnant once they stop focusing on their infertility is a known fact. I wish you blessings whatever you do, and I hope you achieve your dreams.

Fibroid Shrinker said...

Thanks much for the honest and refreshing input. I have been doing some things recently to try to shift the focus of what I am doing / how I am living, to focus more on overall health and relationship & fun with my husband, rather than on strictly the fibroids and fertility aspect. I think you have an excellent point and and while I think it might be hard to completely not think about it at all, I very much agree that shifting the focus seems like a good idea. So thanks for the extra push on that!