Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Excerpt:

Epigenetics—the way genes switch on and off—is another area of intense interest for schizophrenia researchers. Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. We inherit our genes, but environment strongly affects the switching mechanisms. This was dramatically demonstrated in a study of persons born during the “Dutch Hunger Winter” of 1944–1945—a famine the Nazis created in the Netherlands by cutting off food supplies in retaliation for Dutch participation in the resistance. Infants born during the famine to half-starved mothers, a cohort now turning 70, have higher rates of all kinds of pathology, including schizophrenia.

I am super tired today, fall out from my own struggles with getting well in the face of a genetic disorder and doctor pronounced sentence of death. I feel pretty apathetic. I don't know how much is chemical, how much is situational. I get so tired of being treated like a loon by the world.

The disease, malnutrition, epigenetics, inflammation -- all that stuff is stuff I have worked on to deal with my own issues. I flail about, unable to find a way to speak of it. I have mostly moved on to trying to figure out how to make money instead of how to help other people.

I don't quite know what to say. Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection. Infection promotes malnourishment. Malnourishment does all kinds of wonky things to the brain.

I am not having a great week, physically, and it has a track record of impacting my mental functioning and mood. My only known auditory hallucinations are related to an overdose of decongestants. I have no reason to believe schizophrenia runs in my family but the article hits a nerve in some important ways.

Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection.

Do you have any more on this? I have stumbled across the notion before. Someone typically counters with "but the body maintains a constant pH" and the conversation dissolves.

Stay well.

I dismantled my website due to ugly public attacks and moved it twice. I kept the info but it is currently not published.

The body does not maintain a constant ph. The body maintains the BLOOD at a very narrow range of ph because if your blood leaves that very narrow range of ph, you die. But if you watch crap about dinosaurs and stuff, you learn that not only are bones necessary to support your mass when you leave the ocean, they are necessary to mediate your blood ph. You can have sharks and invertebrates in the ocean because the mineralized sea water maintains their blood balance. When you leave the ocean, your body strips the bones of calcium to maintain blood ph when the body is in crisis. This is consistent with the fact that my condition is known to promote acidity of the tissues and also known to cause early onset osteoporosis, as early as the teens.

If you develop acute acidosis (example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_Ketoacidosis), they hospitalize you because you can die within 72 hours if it is not successfully treated. But then for my condition, they don't even treat the acidosis that they know it causes.

So whoever told you the body maintains a constant ph is full of shit. It isn't true. The body maintains a constant blood ph, a very different answer. I think blood tests are likely not a very good indicator of subtle or early problems because your body places a real high priority on keeping your blood in homeostasis in order to not die. I suspect we would really need to do tissue samples to genuinely track some things in a meaningful way. So I tracked things symptomatically since a lot of the tests the doctors ran said there was "nothing wrong with me" yet I was dying.

Feel free to email me if you want to discuss it further.

As somebody who follows this topic very closely (nutrition, inflammation, mental health and autoimmune diseases), I find Terry Wahls' work to be very encouraging. I also find the strong interest by the research communities in inflammation and its causes to be cause for hope. My personal opinion is we've created incredibly toxic environments through a thousand mildly-toxic cuts, and I hope we can make it better sometime soon.

I guess my frustration is I have been resolving my own issues for more than thirteen years. To me, this should not remotely be a hope of "sometime soon." It is something I think we have the information to be resolving in the here and now. I am baffled and frustrated that I get so much hostility for attempting to speak of my own experiences in addressing such issues.

Yes, a thousand mildly toxic cuts is certainly a factor in my life, snowballed in part due to a bottleneck in how my cells function.

Thank you for commenting.

When I look back on the objective history of nutrition and chronic disease, I get extremely passed off. The entire field has been driven by egos and check books, even as good studies have shown how wrong those egos were.

While we still have huge holes in our knowledge, there is a lot of good, rigorously tested information available today. The decision I've come to is that I'm going to trust nobody but myself. There are no authorities I trust, but there are people whose science I will read before others (people who've shown integrity and the ability to design and carry out good science (not very many, unfortunately)). Unfortunately, it's places like schizophrenia where our knowledge gaps are most pronounced. I hope some day we will understand the brain and, more importantly, be able to fix it.

Good luck with your own issues. So many people don't take responsibility for their own health, and that's when this go really bad. Our society believes doctors are the beginning and end of our health. They may be the end[1], but we, individually, are the beginning.

1. I'm referring to chronic conditions here. Doctors have done some amazing things for infectious and acute disorders.

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