My own thought has been that Epstein-Barr comes into the cells through the vitamin D receptor, making that the confounding factor.

But a recent article makes it much clearer. These researchers found that Herpes virus 6 exposure doubled patients’ risk of developing multiple sclerosis.

Rather than parsing out the blame, can we start grouping these together? “There are eight herpesviruses for which humans are the primary host.  They are the herpes simplex virus 1, herpes simplex virus 2, varicella-zoster virus, Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, Human herpesvirus-6, Human herpesvirus-7, and Kaposi’s sarcoma herpes virus. “

Combine this group with genetic susceptibility and vitamin D deficiency, and we might be a lot closer to both causation and possible elimination of this disease.

I know, smoking? Who does that any more? Haven’t we all seen the Marlboro man with cancer? Those hip, smart ads telling us that we should stop?

Yep, we have. And, because those ads are now plastered with big warnings, the tobacco companies have been promoting vaping. Why? Because seeing vaping ads makes former smokers more likely to smoke cigarettes.

Oh, wait. You mean this whole vaping thing is a smokescreen for promoting more cigarette sales? That’s right. So go ahead and ban the fruit flavors, Mr. President. There’s a new Marlboro man in town, and he’s a fifth grader with a vape pen.

But aren’t vape pens a better alternative than cigarettes? Really? Who told you that? Was it a vaping spokesperson? If you ask John Hopkins, they say this, “we don’t know.” What they do know is that vaping has not been proven to help people quit smoking, that nicotine is as addictive as heroin, and that young people are getting hooked on vaping.

Let’s just look at the nicotine alone in a vape pen. It can profoundly alter an adolescent brain, affecting decision-making and increasing the risk of cognitive impairment and psychiatric disorders. It affects attention and the growing adolescent brain is profoundly sensitive to rewiring by exposure to nicotine, hooking a person for life.

But that doesn’t even matter, because vaping pens are full of we-don’t-know-what solvents. Anything they want to put in there, completely unregulated. We know that a combination of these solvents causes very serious lung disease, but we don’t know which ones and how much you can safely have. In other words, there is no safe dosage for a vape pen. Read my answer on what causes popcorn lung for more information.

The CDC needs to get with the program. They are still promoting vaping for helping smokers quit. But at the same time, they know vaping does horrible things and we don’t know why. It’s time to ban vaping, not just the fruit flavors. We do it when a vegetable might be causing a problem. (Remember the great romaine lettuce ban?)

If we can do it for lettuce, we can do it for a poorly-disguised run around by big tobacco to hook our kids on nicotine. Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Let’s do it before our kids have no brains.

Click to access OSH-2019-E-Cigarette-Print-Ad-508.pdf

If you’d like more from my brain, please go to: naturopathicmaine.com

Here’s the problem. He Shou Wu (Fo-Ti) has been associated with liver failure. Now, I’m not someone who doesn’t understand that herbs get blamed for all sorts of things. I lived through kava kava getting banned. But the information on He Shou Wu seems legitimate. “Twenty-nine patients with He Shou Wu-induced liver injury were enrolled. The median age was 53 years (range 15-74) and 75.9% (22/29) were women. ” Most of them recovered, but “One patient was rechallenged with He Shou Wu and two developed autoimmune features. One patient died of liver failure and three had chronic persistent liver injury. ”

That most recent study was from February of this year. But digging a little further I found liver damage reports dating back to at least 2001. Keep in mind that He Shou Wu (Fo-Ti) is an extremely common prescription. For insomnia alone, it’s the most commonly prescribed single herb. So what we’re talking about are the side effects of a tiny percentage of those taking He Shou Wu (Fo-Ti).

Anyone considering taking this herb should keep in mind that herbs are not just natural, they are very powerful. If it can make you well, it can make you sick. The difference is in the dosage. “human beings do not respond uniformly to one or more drugs or even herbal medicines. Our genetic make-up, ethnic background, sex, renal and hepatic functions, diseases and nutritional states, ages and other factors such as the route of administration, all contribute toward the heterogeneity of our responses.”

They found that people treated with drugs for prostate cancer were more likely to develop dementia.

So does the treatment cause dementia? Maybe, maybe not.

The treatment also can increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes, which both can also increase the risk of dementia. So the dementia could just be from those things.

What’s missing from the current treatment conversation is that having prostate cancer itself may increase your risk of getting dementia. So the drugs might be doing nothing at all.

And what’s missing from that discussion is that age itself is the overwhelming factor that leads to dementia. Nothing else comes close. So the most likely conclusion is that older men get prostate cancer. Older men also get dementia. So dementia and prostate cancer or prostate cancer treatment are just increasingly likely as we get older.

I’ve detailed much more about how we get dementia, why dementia isn’t even a good diagnosis anymore, and what to do about it in my new book, The Dementia Diet.

Longer answer: Nothing is perfectly safe. There is probably someone out there allergic to melatonin, and I’d be the last person to tell them they’re not.

With anything you’re taking if you notice a dramatic change in how you feel, immediately suspect it.  Maybe the change is good (like antibiotics for bacterial infections) but when it’s bad don’t delay in asking about it. We lose way too many people every year from drug interactions because they didn’t speak up about serious side effects.

That said, melatonin is about as safe as they come. It’s a natural body product, so your liver should know how to break it down and there shouldn’t be a build up in your system.  

But a patient recently asked me about melatonin for children, because there seems to be some new concerns about it causing problems. 

I went on the web, that bastion of all wisdom and knowledge. It seems like the number one writer questioning melatonin is a registered dietitian from New Zealand, where melatonin is prescription only. His conclusion is that it’s safe, but he quotes a long list of side effects.

(In full disclosure, I also made a similar case for possible side effects in 2014. I’m not a fan of people living on melatonin forever). 

The side effects list the dietitian uses comes from a review of insomnia aids for ADHD children, which shouldn’t be applied to the general population. That review covers a wide range of things. It ends up making judgments based on only five articles. “Despite the dearth of evidence… antihistaminergic medications, tricyclic antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, serotonin 2 antagonist/reuptake inhibitors (SARI, e.g. trazodone), α-adrenergic agonists, or exogenous melatonin…” 

There’s a lot of things to cover here, and only one of them is not prescription. It makes me suspect bias, putting melatonin in with a wide range of fairly toxic pharmaceutical drugs. It’s a bit like seeing a bunch of heavy metals listed as possible treatments and then seeing dandelion added in at the end. Which one of these is a non-prescription supplement without strict FDA oversight and manufacturing practices?

Being me, I have to go into the full article. It quotes a double-blind melatonin study (2007) that helped with sleep and found “No significant adverse effects or discontinuation because of adverse events.” 

That study was followed up years later by a parental questionnaire. In that follow-up questionnaire survey over 80% of children were still happily on melatonin doses from 0.5 to 10 mg four years later.  Another 9% had stopped melatonin because they didn’t need it. But let’s not focus on the overwhelming nontoxic, successful treatment. Let’s focus on the report that, ” Three patients (3.1%) discontinued because of adverse effects. Parents of 7 children (7.4%) reported unexpected comorbidity.” 

 One would hope that a double-blind study would be given greater weight than a parent survey four years later, but this review gives them equal weight.

Remember, the review covers a lot of other drugs. Of all the drugs used, melatonin is the only one that is both effective and non-toxic.

But instead of promoting melatonin, the review concludes that nothing should be given. The reviewer goes out of his way to list all the side effects in the first study, “Ten children (18.9%) experienced adverse events such as headaches (5.7%), hyperactivity (5.7%), dizziness (3.8%), and abdominal pain (3.8%), but no patients withdrew from treatment.” Notice the report of hyperactivity as a side effect in a study of ADHD children. Again, the reviewer does not feel objective in the assessment of melatonin.

So the best information we have about melatonin is that it is safe and effective short term even for children with ADHD.

Bottom line, it is theoretically possible to have a side effect from melatonin the same way it is possible to have a side effect from ginger or turmeric (I have a patient possibly dealing with one of those). But we do not expect melatonin to do bad things any more than we’d expect a doorknob to break off in our hands. It might happen, but it shouldn’t keep us awake at night.

And if it does, melatonin will likely help us fall asleep.  But other things can help as well. See my insomnia checklist. 

Why, it’s AFM, or acute flaccid myelitis.

Briefly, children coming down with a stomach bug can become paralyzed. Yep, paralyzed. So why aren’t we more upset? Because public health officials tell us it’s very rare.

How rare? We’re not sure, because we don’t monitor stomach flu in the U.S.

But let’s take rareness as a justification for non-concern.

Remember Zika virus? How we lost our minds over that disease? Any idea how many people died of Zika in the U.S.? Maybe one?

Or pick the most recent recall of all romaine lettuce in the U.S. and Canada. How many people died of that outbreak? No one. Only 32 people even got sick.

So rarity is not a reason for not publicizing a disease that is by all accounts more common and has worse long term effects.

AFM is nasty, and hopefully we can stop it before it becomes more common.

Where did AFM come from?

This isn’t a new issue, it’s an ongoing story from a few years back. As a country, the U.S. stopped screening for paralysis since polio cases stopped. But after hearing a few case reports, California started screening again in 2012. Out of two hundred reported cases, California public health determined 59 patients had AFM. Of these, two older patients died. The average patient was around nine years old, and after almost a year of follow-up, only 7 had fully recovered from the paralysis.

For more including what doesn’t work a an experimental treatment, go to https://sites.google.com/view/naturopathicmaine/blogs/acute-flaccid-myelitis.

The Great Leafy Greens Ban of January 2018. (That never happened.)

Do you remember the Great Leafy Greens Ban of January 2018? No? Because there wasn’t any. Why?  In January of this year, there was an E. coli outbreak. “The CDC traced 25 illnesses in 15 states and a death in California to the outbreak.” This outbreak reached from the U.S. to Canada, exactly like the current outbreak. But “no recall in either country was initiated, and to date no suppliers, growers or origin of production has been identified.” That’s right, a year later we still haven’t identified the source, and yet we didn’t pull all the leafy greens in the U.S. and Canada.

The Yuma Romaine Ban of April 2018 (That never happened.)

Then in April of 2018, we had another outbreak. This one involved romaine lettuce and went on for months. Before they found the source, the FDA recommended that consumers “practice safe food handling and preparation and to consult a health care provider if they think they might have symptoms of E. coli infection.” What? No recall? Nope. Even after that outbreak was linked to a specific growing region (Yuma, Arizona) and they knew the romaine could be in the food supply throughout the country, no recall was made. This outbreak had over two hundred illnesses, 96 hospitalizations, and five deaths. But no recall.

The Great Romaine Ban of November 2018 (this is happening?)

So now we’re all out of romaine, because the “CDC is advising that U.S. consumers not eat any romaine lettuce, and retailers and restaurants not serve or sell any, until we learn more about the outbreak. This investigation is ongoing and the advice will be updated as more information is available.” We’re talking a blanket ban on all romaine lettuce countrywide and into Canada. Really?

Now, I’m not saying I don’t feel for those affected. I’m saying I don’t understand the response. According to the FDA, the last case associated with this November outbreak was October 31st. We had 32 cases and 13 hospitalizations. No reported deaths.

More importantly, the genetic material of this E. coli outbreak looks an awful lot like the E. coli outbreak that happened in January of this year in the leafy greens (and possibly in romaine back then, but they weren’t sure).

In other words, this outbreak is really likely to be the SAME problem to the FDA didn’t deal with back in January. A year later, the same producer is still using the same contaminated water source and we’re all getting sick again.

Here’s the rub. It’s the same problem, but we’re all out of romaine now. Completely different reaction. We didn’t even get the middle warning of “wash your romaine.” Just complete ban.

Before you think, “well, it’s good for our health” realize that we’re talking about the destruction of an industry, without any real evidence that we’re going to be safer. Romaine lettuce sales are down $71 million dollars this year. Next year growers are going to grow something else, if they’re still in business. And we’re going to continue to have E. coli outbreaks because we no longer have the time to wash our own vegetables. 

Fructan is a fructose polymer, which means a bunch of fructose end-to-end. So to say fructans are the problem is basically saying it’s fructose, not gluten, that is causing the problem.

If we take a step back from medical speak for a moment, doesn’t that mean that Non-Wheat Gluten Sensitivity is really a fruit allergy? But, wouldn’t the sufferer know that? Bread, not so good, but apples really give you diarrhea? So, that’s my first issue.

My second issue is the study itself. They fed fifty-nine people muesli bars. Some of these bars had gluten, some had fructan, and some were just placebo. Over time, all the participants ate all three bars. More of them had symptoms on the fructan bars than on the gluten bars. So that was the headline.

What didn’t make the news was the placebo bars. More people had problems on the placebo bars than on the gluten bars. Almost as many people had problems on placebo as had problems on fructan. “Thirteen participants had the highest overall GSRS-IBS score after consuming gluten, 24 had the highest score after consuming fructan, and 22 had the highest score after consuming placebo.” So that says to me that the placebo itself was enough of a problem they should probably have thrown out the results instead of tagging fructan for being slightly nastier than the placebo.

So is fructan off the hook? No. Nothing is off the hook. Why? “No systematic studies are available on NCGS.” Which means every muesli bar challenge will make the news until we get bigger, more systematic trials.

Yes, there are other studies out there, some of them showing some benefit from a low fructan diet. But the total of all the studies is 197 patients. That’s a pretty small number to put millions of people on a restrictive diet that may or may not benefit them. The same could be said of the low or no gluten diet, which is now popular among about a third of the population.

Here’s a simple test. Avoid something for four days. Then binge on it. If it causes problems, then it’s a problem. If it’s not a problem, it’s not a problem. Life is too short to make problems for yourself.

That’s the problem with the Outback Vision Protocol, which was first sent to me by a patient. The extremely long infomercial-style presentation promised me that two marvelous supplements would cure very serious vision problems. My hearty presenter informed me that these supplements, with the addition of kangaroo meat, are what a keen-eyed group of soldiers use for superhuman vision. They cured his wife’s eye problems and they could cure mine.

Some of you already can see what’s coming. But if you’re one of the millions of people dealing with macular degeneration, you might keep reading and pull out your credit card. So let me save you the time.

At long last, the supplements were revealed to me. They were (drumroll please) lutein and zeaxanthin. If I seem underwhelmed, I am. These are not mysterious or new. They’ve been around for decades. In fact, they’ve even been tested for exactly the sort of use that the presenter is making on his infomercial. AREDS 2 tested the use of lutein and zeaxanthin for macular degeneration because researchers saw enough possible benefit. The study was done, and the results are already back.

“In the AREDS2 trial, adding DHA/EPA or lutein/zeaxanthin to the original formulation (containing beta-carotene) had no additional overall effect on the risk of advanced AMD.”

Now, that’s not the end of the story, but since I’ve spent months on this issue, I think I’ll spare those of you who just wanted the short answer. The longer answer is here, and the book I wrote about the longer answer is here. (If you don’t like Amazon, you can find the book here, and multiple audio options at the end of the longer answer

).

Getting dementia and Alzheimer’s is a terrifying prospect. It can also be bankrupting if you require lengthy home or institutional care.

So when the Washington Post published a story about a test predicting our risk of Alzheimer’s as far back as adolescence, I was intrigued.  A half a million kids took the test, so now we have definitive data on whether we’ll get Alzheimer’s? Let’s have a look at that test!

Well, they give some sample questions in the Washington Post article, but nobody really wants to sit through a two-day test that somebody cooked up in the 1960’s when Dick and Jane books were seriously how we learned to read. Or we would, if it would really predict our chances of getting a dread disease.

What the researchers found after tracking down the test participants using their fifty-year high school reunions was that lower scores in mechanical performance predicted about 17% more risk of dementia for men, while lower scores in verbal memory predicted about 16% of the risk for women. Remember, these kids were tested for two days, covering almost twenty different subjects. So my first impression was that they gathered lots of data, found a couple of significant numbers, and published those. The summary makes it look like cherry picking for publication.

But looking at the full JAMA study, it wasn’t just those two areas that showed a connection. The same results held about at about 12% for almost all the different tests. So doing poorly on this test did increase the subjects’ risks of getting dementia. By about 12%, which isn’t that much, but also isn’t nothing. 

We may only be confirming what we already knew. (more)