Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and finding the side of your head black and your ear twice its normal size. That's what happened to Brad Burnam, who caught a deadly superbug at the hospital where he worked. Sometime after having emergency surgery--one of 21 surgeries over the next five years--he set out to cure himself.  The result he created was a fusion of PHMB, an antibiotic common in Europe but little known in the US, in a petroleum jelly base (like Vaseline), held together with a stabilizer/emulsifier. It sticks to wounds, keeps them moist, and provides a barrier. It cured his antibiotic resistant superbug. After getting FDA clearance, he formed Turn Therapeutics, and Hexagen is now available by prescription.  Screen shot from https://turntherapeutics.com/about/ Millions of Americans suffer from open wounds--chronic issues like diabetic foot ulcers. Readers probably have their blood sugar under control and avoid this condition, but might have parents, partners o...

There's a lot of talk now about how factors besides genes and current diet affect health and weight: the health of your mother when you were a fetus, your diet as a child, stress, and environment. Another is wear and tear. A few years ago when I fell off my bike and broke a tooth and knocked two others out of place, my dentist said that the two knocked out of place would likely need a root canal someday because of the injury. It could be two weeks, it could be two years, he said. Now, nearly three years later, the canine that was injured is abscessed.  Between being lethargic (doing nothing but watching Netflix when I got home), wearing my winter coat when everyone else was in shirtsleeves, and having an odd appetite (I've been living mostly on Quest bars this past month), I should have known I was sick. But I have a high threshold of pain. Finally, my face swelled up Friday morning and I made an appointment with my oral surgeon--the one who did my dental implant and g...

Let me tell you about my parents: same age, same socioeconomic background, same race, and up until a few years ago, same diet. From there, they're quite different. My father worked construction, enjoyed hunting and fishing in his younger days, is emotionally self-controlled, and bears up well against suffering. He developed mild diabetes a few years ago, but has been lean and fit most of his life. My mother had several surgeries, a bad back, torn rotator cuffs, was obese for many years, developed diabetes and suffered from uncontrolled blood sugars for 20 years, but started a low-carb diet four years ago. She hasn't been very active for much of her life. Emotionally, she could use more resilience. A few months ago, they went to the hospital about the same time--my father for a bad cut on his arm and bump on his head after a fall; my mother, because her kidneys were shutting down. One of my parents made a remarkable recovery and stayed with their mate Monday night at th...

Best conversation yet: Cashier: How did you get hurt? Me: I fell off my bike. Cashier: Are you going to ride a bike again? Me: Nope. Cashier: So you didn't lose your common sense. That was Sunday. It's Friday, and strangers have stopped asking what happened to me since I'm a lot less black and blue now. I'm washing my own hair, putting on makeup and getting through a day at work without exhaustion. I don't do much at home besides cooking and dishes, and out-eating a teenage boy. Two eggs or a quarter pound of beef is a snack; either one used to be a meal. Rebuilding flesh and replenishing blood (I bled for a day when I fell) must take a lot of nutrients. I'm not wearing the extra calories--I've lost weight. The braces are working. My front teeth are straighter than they've been since I was a kid, and I can chew a little bit, very carefully. Since the tooth that broke was narrower than an implant, I'll have to have my top teeth re-aligned t...

My bike accident a few days ago left me with bad road rash. To help keep it from getting infected, I've been applying coconut oil to my scrapes and rinsing my mouth with it. In my last post , I linked to a couple of papers about coconut oil's ability to kill certain bacteria, and in some cases, its superiority over traditional antibiotics. So far, I don't have any infection. What has surprised me is how fast my scrapes are healing. I don't have a photo of myself from four days ago, but the pink spot on my chin was a bad scrape, so red the nurse called it a cherry. She put two bandages on it. Here's how it looks today: This isn't Photoshopped--there's just a rosy pink spot of intact skin and no scar. Same story with my knee. Look very closely above my kneecap and you can see the thin brown outline of where a large bandage was. I didn't bother applying coconut oil to a scrape on my foot. It was small, so I figured it would be fine on its own. A...

I recently wrote about my SWAMP hypothesis of curing a sinus (or upper respiratory) infection with Mucinex, salt and a large dose of vitamin D. In testing my hypothesis on my own infection, I may have overdosed a little on the vitamin D , so I've been doing some research on vitamin D dosing. In several studies, subjects have been given a one-time dose of 100,000 IU of vitamin D. In one of those studies, the vitamin D levels were tested every few days and graphed. The vitamin D level peaked seven days after the dose, and the measured levels in the subjects didn't even come close to being toxic. (When you look at the graphs, keep in mind that the units are in nmol/L.) The maximum level in any subject was 48.1 ng/mL (ng/mL being the usual unit of measure for vitamin D levels).(1) This is a normal level of vitamin D. In another study, subjects were given a one-time 100,000 IU dose: A single dose in winter of 2.5 mg (100 000 IU) vitamin D has previously been shown to produ...

Having taken megadoses of vitamin D for the past few weeks (think 10,000 to 50,000 IU per day), I now have some symptoms of vitamin D toxicity: muscle weakness, a little fatigue, and constipation. (I wondered last night why I found it so difficult to shovel a few inches of wet snow.) Overall, I feel pretty good, certainly better than when I was sick with a sinus infection and way better than when I was suffering from side effects and an allergic reaction to Benzonatate. A few people have remarked that I sound better and the pink is back in my cheeks. Without a test, it's not possible to know for certain that these symptoms are caused by too much vitamin D, but I'm going to stop taking it for now. The vitamin is stored in the fat, so it's going to be in my system for awhile, fighting any microbes left in my sinuses. Researcher Michael Holick says in The Vitamin D Solution, Most humans obtain from sun exposure their vitamin D requirements between the hours of 10:00 A.M. an...

I'm 90% better from my sinus infection...and have been so for a week. A nine-hour nap followed by a good night's sleep helped last weekend; so has Mucinex. But last Monday, the day the antibiotics were out of my system, the glands in my neck were swollen. That's when I decided to use a trick from a year and a half ago when I had a cold: a megadose of vitamin D. There's some compelling evidence that vitamin D helps prevent colds and flu. In one study, After 3 years, a total of 34 patients reported cold and influenza symptoms, eight in the vitamin D3 group vs. 26 in the placebo group (P<0·002). When we examined the seasonality of the symptoms, we found that the placebo group had cold/influenza symptoms mostly in the winter. The vitamin D group had symptoms throughout the year while on 20 μg/d [800 IU per day], whereas only one subject had a cold/influenza while on 50 μg/d [2,000 IU per day].(1)  For what it's worth, John Cannell M.D. of the Vitamin D Council...

Yesterday I was at a restaurant when I ran into one of my dance partners and promised to see him at the dance that night. Three hours later, I was lying in bed, sick, too tired to move, the furnace turned up to 75 degrees, regretting my promise. Even after two rounds of antibiotics, my sinus infection never really left. At my mother's urging, I saw the doctor today. In idle conversation, my doctor described modular robots during our visit: tiny robots that regroup on their own if they're broken apart. Sounds like an apt metaphor for this sinus infection that has held on for two months through two rounds of antibiotics. The next step: amox-clav, an antibiotic with penicillin (amox) and an extra ingredient (clav) to knock down the infection's resistance to penicillin. As I've said before, proper diet is great for promoting good health, and I believe cutting out the megadoses of zinc has helped me. But if it's true that a lot of paleo people died of trauma and ...

If this were a short story, it would be full of foreshadowing. But like a good mystery, it's hard to connect the dots until the end. If you can't, don't worry--I'll tie it together at the end. I follow a mostly lacto-paleo diet and live pretty cleanly. But I've had a sinus infection for a month, and it's survived one and a half rounds of antibiotics.  I normally eat liver once a week, but haven't had the stomach for it lately. (Even when I'm well, I'm not a liver lover.) A few months ago, I started buying those big, dark chocolate bars--the 70% cocoa ones--and eating one per weekend. (I know what I said last night about hating sweets . It seems to be fruity sweets that I hate; maybe they remind me of medicine.) I started dreading my breakfast smoothie of butter, hot water, pumpkin pie spice and vitamins, even though I like the taste. I sometimes skipped it on the weekend. The vitamins included large doses of zinc and magnesium, a middling dos...

Until recently, I'd been having bad nosebleeds for a while. Specifically, since November 1999 when I had septoplasty surgery. My otolaryngologist recommended it because I had a deviated septum (that's the stiff middle part of the inside of the nose) and enlarged turbinates . I had frequent sinus infections and supposedly, this surgery would help prevent them. (It didn't. But it was nice to be able to breath through both sides of my nose at the same time.) About a month ago, I read the following in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution p. 126, published in 1972: About vitamins in general, I don't believe in minimum daily requirements. I believe in optimum dosage. I have used vitamins in megadoses in my practice with great success. .... You cannot safely increase the standard dosage of Vitamin A (5,000 international units) nor of Vitamin D (400 international units). But so-called overdoses of the other vitamins are simply flushed away by the kidneys. And the mineral and vitami...

Four days later, I got back in the dentist's chair. My gums, lymph glands and chin were swollen, even though I was taking antibiotics. "What happens if the tooth is still infected?" I asked with a pineapple-flavored swab in my mouth. "We'd do a temporary filling and let it drain, let it heal, then do a permanent filling." The dentist looked in my mouth and seemed surprised. "Amoxicillin kills 99.9% of infections." He said I needed broader spectrum antibiotic. He gave me a shot that made me numb from my front teeth to my inner ear. A few minutes later, he and his assistant started work and I squealed. "Cold," I explained. The assistant put something fibrous behind my lip and started again. It felt like they were removing tartar from the tooth next to the infected one. Awhile later, the dentist said he was done. That was it? I didn't know they'd started drilling. The assistant spent the next few minutes getting all the fiber out of ...