Taking a Medical History
Sad to hear that Bruce Willis has announced his retirement from acting due to a diagnosis of aphasia. Since I have no life and haven't slept enough this morning, for giggles I have been trying to look stuff up about the man.
I can't readily find a statement as to what kind of aphasia he has, but generally speaking aphasia is a speech disorder usually caused by a head injury or stroke. Very reasonably, his family is speculating that his aphasia may be due to a head injury he received on set in 2002.
It's a very reasonable guess because he has apparently been deteriorating a long time and his issues are now too severe to keep accommodating on set. So, no, this is not a recent issue. It's an old issue that has become unmanageable and unhideable.
He also seems to have been a heavy drinker at one time and it seems he used to smoke. Drinking alcohol may signify a number of different things and I don't know what to guess in this case, but smokers are often self-treating for depression and it's known that specific drugs that treat depression also have a high incidence of causing smokers to quit.
So smoking is a potential clue to a specific chemical deficiency in the brain, apparently dopamine. A history of smoking also suggests one would need lung support. There is likely lung damage.
He's an older man with visibly gray hair. Gray hair suggests the need for adrenal support and a possible specific B vitamin deficiency, a vitamin called PABA which is not typically found in "B vitamin" supplements and usually has to be bought separately.
This is pertinent to neurological issues because B vitamins play such a big role in brain health. So any clues as to which B vitamins he may need more of would be important things to pay attention to.
Ideally, if this is your OWN medical issue you are trying to address, you will also list things like every medication you have ever taken and look up nutrient depletions for each of those drugs. And think about other ways those drugs may be pertinent to your current issue.
For example, anesthesia in specific is designed to have neurological effects and old anesthesia can linger in the tissues in my experience and contribute to neurological issues. Those old drug residues may need to come out to fully resolve an issue.
Places you have lived may also be pertinent. I lived in the High Desert at one time not hugely far from where the movie Erin Brockovich is set and I likely have hexavalent chromium poisoning as one of my issues.
I am not a doctor and this blog is not medical advice.
What I know is a process for how an ordinary person can use the vast wealth of existing knowledge to address their health issues effectively without requiring a doctor's permission to work on their health. This is rooted in an older model where diet and lifestyle are the foundations of health, not doctor's visits, drugs and surgeries.
If you are looking for miracle cures on the internet because doctors can't help you, you will need to customize things to your needs because the path I took will be different from the path you need to take. (I have a genetic disorder that significantly impacts everything I do healthwise.)
How this typically looks is you have X problem and you learn Y nutrient may help and you take that and go "Oh, that actually does seem to help! Let's take more of that!" And then you eventually run into a wall and maybe you need the nutrient in question to maintain your gains but you don't seem to be making further gains.
That does not necessarily mean you have made all the progress you can possibly make. It usually means you need to learn some new trick to add to your bag of tricks.
Always be looking for the next weakest link. That will be your next step in your healing journey.
And it can sometimes take weeks or months to ferret out info, find the right source for the exact specific chemically correct nutrient you need and figure out how to best use that as part of your regimen. The longer you go down this road, the more bits and pieces will be pertinent to your mental model of your specific body, your specific health issue and how to address it.
Over time, you will get better at going "Based on my symptoms today, I need x nutrient. That is found in x, y and z foods that I eat. I shall have some of y as part of my lunch today."
Anything I say about my life and my experiences should be seen as a jumping off point to create your own tailor-made solutions for your life, not a prescription to be followed exactly. Even in cases where I give a lot of detail, you should view that as me doing my best to give you enough information to get started and not something you can't tweak further yourself at some point as you become more knowledgeable about your issue than I will ever be.
So while you are taking your first supplement, figuring out how to dose it, figuring out when you need more and what is an indication you've taken too much and tracking info in a journal, you should also be researching your next step.
If you have neurological issues, you should start with B vitamins. There are two reasons for that:
For neurological issues, the next thing you should look at is cholesterol because the brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body. Because of my awareness of that fact, when I have had neurological issues in the past, I ate a lot of bacon, eggs and butter and sometimes had immediate results from that.
In one case, I was dumping old anesthesia residue and unable to string together a coherent sentence. So I promptly ate a meal consisting of bacon, eggs and flat bread slathered with butter and was coherent again twenty minutes later.
I have a genetic disorder that causes me to misprocess fats. Because of that fact, I am on a doctor prescribed high fat, high salt, high calorie diet and I have lost several dress sizes since upping my consumption of the right kinds of fats, so I am really cavalier about eating as much fat as I feel like eating.
This is probably not a good policy for someone who doesn't have my genetic disorder. So let's look at the brain and cholesterol a little more closely.
This article indicates Cholesterol Is Synthesized from Acetyl Coenzyme A in Three Stages. A quick search indicates you can purchase Acetyl Coenzyme A supplements.
Further digging indicates that pantothenic acid (B5) is the precursor for Acetyl Coenzyme A.
So you may be able to resolve a lot of brain issues by taking B5 in high doses for long periods so the brain can build its own cholesterol. Or you may need to research that further and find out what other building blocks the body needs to make cholesterol in house.
Since 5 percent of the cholesterol found in the brain is not made in house, you may see some neurological gains from eating a high cholesterol diet (or the occasional high cholesterol meal) and some people may get more out of that than others for various reasons.
A high cholesterol meal when I'm having neurological issues works really well for me. But you can also invent your own path for supplying the brain with the precursors it needs to make its own cholesterol in house.
This post is not a complete recipe for how to do that. It's just an example of the process and there are likely plenty of rabbit holes you can go down in finding answers for yourself.
If the occasional bacon, egg and butter meal does good things for your neurological issues, coolios and good for you. If you know you can't do that all the time because it will exacerbate other health issues or cause excessive weight gain, then precursors may be the way to go to let your brain heal without ruining your waistline or clogging up your arteries.
Off the top of my head, here are some other things you may need to deal with when healing neurological stuff:
I can't readily find a statement as to what kind of aphasia he has, but generally speaking aphasia is a speech disorder usually caused by a head injury or stroke. Very reasonably, his family is speculating that his aphasia may be due to a head injury he received on set in 2002.
It's a very reasonable guess because he has apparently been deteriorating a long time and his issues are now too severe to keep accommodating on set. So, no, this is not a recent issue. It's an old issue that has become unmanageable and unhideable.
He also seems to have been a heavy drinker at one time and it seems he used to smoke. Drinking alcohol may signify a number of different things and I don't know what to guess in this case, but smokers are often self-treating for depression and it's known that specific drugs that treat depression also have a high incidence of causing smokers to quit.
So smoking is a potential clue to a specific chemical deficiency in the brain, apparently dopamine. A history of smoking also suggests one would need lung support. There is likely lung damage.
He's an older man with visibly gray hair. Gray hair suggests the need for adrenal support and a possible specific B vitamin deficiency, a vitamin called PABA which is not typically found in "B vitamin" supplements and usually has to be bought separately.
This is pertinent to neurological issues because B vitamins play such a big role in brain health. So any clues as to which B vitamins he may need more of would be important things to pay attention to.
Ideally, if this is your OWN medical issue you are trying to address, you will also list things like every medication you have ever taken and look up nutrient depletions for each of those drugs. And think about other ways those drugs may be pertinent to your current issue.
For example, anesthesia in specific is designed to have neurological effects and old anesthesia can linger in the tissues in my experience and contribute to neurological issues. Those old drug residues may need to come out to fully resolve an issue.
Places you have lived may also be pertinent. I lived in the High Desert at one time not hugely far from where the movie Erin Brockovich is set and I likely have hexavalent chromium poisoning as one of my issues.
I am not a doctor and this blog is not medical advice.
What I know is a process for how an ordinary person can use the vast wealth of existing knowledge to address their health issues effectively without requiring a doctor's permission to work on their health. This is rooted in an older model where diet and lifestyle are the foundations of health, not doctor's visits, drugs and surgeries.
If you are looking for miracle cures on the internet because doctors can't help you, you will need to customize things to your needs because the path I took will be different from the path you need to take. (I have a genetic disorder that significantly impacts everything I do healthwise.)
How this typically looks is you have X problem and you learn Y nutrient may help and you take that and go "Oh, that actually does seem to help! Let's take more of that!" And then you eventually run into a wall and maybe you need the nutrient in question to maintain your gains but you don't seem to be making further gains.
That does not necessarily mean you have made all the progress you can possibly make. It usually means you need to learn some new trick to add to your bag of tricks.
Always be looking for the next weakest link. That will be your next step in your healing journey.
And it can sometimes take weeks or months to ferret out info, find the right source for the exact specific chemically correct nutrient you need and figure out how to best use that as part of your regimen. The longer you go down this road, the more bits and pieces will be pertinent to your mental model of your specific body, your specific health issue and how to address it.
Over time, you will get better at going "Based on my symptoms today, I need x nutrient. That is found in x, y and z foods that I eat. I shall have some of y as part of my lunch today."
Anything I say about my life and my experiences should be seen as a jumping off point to create your own tailor-made solutions for your life, not a prescription to be followed exactly. Even in cases where I give a lot of detail, you should view that as me doing my best to give you enough information to get started and not something you can't tweak further yourself at some point as you become more knowledgeable about your issue than I will ever be.
So while you are taking your first supplement, figuring out how to dose it, figuring out when you need more and what is an indication you've taken too much and tracking info in a journal, you should also be researching your next step.
If you have neurological issues, you should start with B vitamins. There are two reasons for that:
- Your brain needs a LOT of B vitamins, so B vitamin deficiency is always the best first guess for any neurological issue.
- B vitamins are water soluble, so if you take too much, you pee out the excess B vitamins. Thus you cannot poison yourself with them.
For neurological issues, the next thing you should look at is cholesterol because the brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body. Because of my awareness of that fact, when I have had neurological issues in the past, I ate a lot of bacon, eggs and butter and sometimes had immediate results from that.
In one case, I was dumping old anesthesia residue and unable to string together a coherent sentence. So I promptly ate a meal consisting of bacon, eggs and flat bread slathered with butter and was coherent again twenty minutes later.
I have a genetic disorder that causes me to misprocess fats. Because of that fact, I am on a doctor prescribed high fat, high salt, high calorie diet and I have lost several dress sizes since upping my consumption of the right kinds of fats, so I am really cavalier about eating as much fat as I feel like eating.
This is probably not a good policy for someone who doesn't have my genetic disorder. So let's look at the brain and cholesterol a little more closely.
95 percent of the cholesterol in the brain is produced in the brain.When the body creates something like that in house, the thing you need to look at is how that happens and what the precursors are. Precursors are the building blocks the body uses to manufacture the thing in question.
This article indicates Cholesterol Is Synthesized from Acetyl Coenzyme A in Three Stages. A quick search indicates you can purchase Acetyl Coenzyme A supplements.
Further digging indicates that pantothenic acid (B5) is the precursor for Acetyl Coenzyme A.
So you may be able to resolve a lot of brain issues by taking B5 in high doses for long periods so the brain can build its own cholesterol. Or you may need to research that further and find out what other building blocks the body needs to make cholesterol in house.
Since 5 percent of the cholesterol found in the brain is not made in house, you may see some neurological gains from eating a high cholesterol diet (or the occasional high cholesterol meal) and some people may get more out of that than others for various reasons.
A high cholesterol meal when I'm having neurological issues works really well for me. But you can also invent your own path for supplying the brain with the precursors it needs to make its own cholesterol in house.
This post is not a complete recipe for how to do that. It's just an example of the process and there are likely plenty of rabbit holes you can go down in finding answers for yourself.
If the occasional bacon, egg and butter meal does good things for your neurological issues, coolios and good for you. If you know you can't do that all the time because it will exacerbate other health issues or cause excessive weight gain, then precursors may be the way to go to let your brain heal without ruining your waistline or clogging up your arteries.
Off the top of my head, here are some other things you may need to deal with when healing neurological stuff:
- You may get a lot of drainage of clear fluid from the eyes and nose. If so, make sure to wash your face and hands. Drinking tea may help keep that down to a dull roar. Tea is an astringent and can help dry up the tissues.
- You may need extra salt, especially if you are getting a lot of drainage from your eyes and nose. Do not take table salt which has anti-caking additives that you don't want when taking on a lot of salt. Instead, take sea salt, kosher salt or canning and pickling salt. Or go to the beach because when you dump salt, it drags other minerals with it. Sea water has a variety of minerals in it, not just salt.
- You may get electrochemically sensitive. This may present with you getting shocked more easily. Salt and the right fats help, but you can also go outside and walk around on the earth barefoot. Sleeping in a tent for years helped resolve my CF-related tendency to get easily shocked all the time.
- And, of course, exercise and sleep hygiene are significant to healing the brain. The brain "takes out the trash" while you sleep.
