It seems to me an agressive niacin protocol going up to 6000mg in divided doses daily is worth trying. Obviously with lots of detox, vit c etc.
Wallace
Here is an extract from a blog
had tried lots of different supplements for CFS, as recommended by various people. For example, Dr. Sarah Myhill recommends a supplement protocol for treating CFS, which she nicked from cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra, which includes co-enzyme Q10, L-carnitine, niacin, D-ribose and magnesium. (Sarah Myhill writes: "acetyl L-carnitine [is] also available through eating red meat, especially mutton, lamb, beef and pork - but to get 2 grams you need to eat about a pound of meat a day!" Who would be so crazy as to a eat a pound of meat per day?! Har har har!) With every supplement I used the question "Does this occur naturally in meat?" as a rule of thumb to determine whether I needed a supplement, because I disagreed with some of supplements people recommended, such as megadoses of vitamin C, which are not natural in a carnivorous diet. As carnitine, Q10, and niacin (also from tryptophane, and in
beef liver) are all found in large amounts in an all-meat diet, I had started using Q10, L-carnitine, and a B-complex from Puritans Pride, among other things. Because ribose does not occur in meat (except in trace amounts), and because it is a carbohydrate, I avoided it.
My chronic fatigue syndrome somehow got better after a few months of zero-carb, but strangely, the maldigestion problems got worse and worse by order of magnitude (I don't have an explanation for this). Zero-carb didn't help me in this regard at all. After months of physical torture, the maldigestion thread on ZIOH finally helped me to figure out I needed HCl.
After a while I figured out that I could take as much as 70 betaine HCl capsules per meal without problems; 80 to 100 caused stronger burning sensations of varying degrees of strength. The most I ever took was 144 (don't ask...). I could swallow 20 capsules on an empty stomach without feeling anything. Recall that the pH scale is logarithmic (with base 10): multiplying the concentration of HCl [by a factor of 10] decreases the pH by 1 point. A 5% solution of betaine HCl is approximately 8 tablets of 648 mg dissolved in 100 ml water. If it is the case that a "5% solution of Betaine HCl has a pH of 1", then 80 capsules have a pH of 0. As a reference point, the pH of an empty stomach is about 1, like a car battery, and food buffers the acidity by about 2-3 pH points upward.
But what is truly more insane is that the gastroenterologist literaly said "I don't believe you have hypochlorhydria"! Both gastroeterologists I visited did not even know what hypochlorhydria was, and didn't test for it; So much for specialists! I could not believe it, but it was just like Dr. Jonathan Wright describes in his excellent book: stomach pH testing and supplemental HCl has fallen in disrepute among doctors apparently because pharmaceutical companies make millions of profit from stomach acid inhibitors.
[continued]
At 8/03/2010 2:34 PM, Anonymous The Plague Doctor said...
In the past months, I have been reading all the books and web sites on hypochlorhydria I could get my hands on. As I almost died from malnutrition before I figured out what was going on, hypochlorhydria has (unfortunately) become of the utmost importance to me (as you can imagine). I became way too fatigued to participate in any forum discussions but I was avidly reading everything. That's when I stumbled upon these series of articles by Dr. Jonathan Prousky (1, 2, 3).
These articles implicate mitochondrial dysfunction as the cause of hypochlorhydria. Since my stomach problems really worsened after I got CFS, and mitochondrial dysfunction is suspected to be the cause of CFS, I (belatedly) decided to resume the ENTIRE recommended supplement protocol for CFS, this time including megadoses of nicotonic acid AND ribose (plus a good B-100 complex): I started using 3 g of nicotinic acid spread throughout the day as well 20 g of ribose spread throughout the day.
Also see this thread on Niacin treating infections:
http://www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=30&m=1255322
Wallace
Here is an extract from a blog
had tried lots of different supplements for CFS, as recommended by various people. For example, Dr. Sarah Myhill recommends a supplement protocol for treating CFS, which she nicked from cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra, which includes co-enzyme Q10, L-carnitine, niacin, D-ribose and magnesium. (Sarah Myhill writes: "acetyl L-carnitine [is] also available through eating red meat, especially mutton, lamb, beef and pork - but to get 2 grams you need to eat about a pound of meat a day!" Who would be so crazy as to a eat a pound of meat per day?! Har har har!) With every supplement I used the question "Does this occur naturally in meat?" as a rule of thumb to determine whether I needed a supplement, because I disagreed with some of supplements people recommended, such as megadoses of vitamin C, which are not natural in a carnivorous diet. As carnitine, Q10, and niacin (also from tryptophane, and in
beef liver) are all found in large amounts in an all-meat diet, I had started using Q10, L-carnitine, and a B-complex from Puritans Pride, among other things. Because ribose does not occur in meat (except in trace amounts), and because it is a carbohydrate, I avoided it.
My chronic fatigue syndrome somehow got better after a few months of zero-carb, but strangely, the maldigestion problems got worse and worse by order of magnitude (I don't have an explanation for this). Zero-carb didn't help me in this regard at all. After months of physical torture, the maldigestion thread on ZIOH finally helped me to figure out I needed HCl.
After a while I figured out that I could take as much as 70 betaine HCl capsules per meal without problems; 80 to 100 caused stronger burning sensations of varying degrees of strength. The most I ever took was 144 (don't ask...). I could swallow 20 capsules on an empty stomach without feeling anything. Recall that the pH scale is logarithmic (with base 10): multiplying the concentration of HCl [by a factor of 10] decreases the pH by 1 point. A 5% solution of betaine HCl is approximately 8 tablets of 648 mg dissolved in 100 ml water. If it is the case that a "5% solution of Betaine HCl has a pH of 1", then 80 capsules have a pH of 0. As a reference point, the pH of an empty stomach is about 1, like a car battery, and food buffers the acidity by about 2-3 pH points upward.
But what is truly more insane is that the gastroenterologist literaly said "I don't believe you have hypochlorhydria"! Both gastroeterologists I visited did not even know what hypochlorhydria was, and didn't test for it; So much for specialists! I could not believe it, but it was just like Dr. Jonathan Wright describes in his excellent book: stomach pH testing and supplemental HCl has fallen in disrepute among doctors apparently because pharmaceutical companies make millions of profit from stomach acid inhibitors.
[continued]
At 8/03/2010 2:34 PM, Anonymous The Plague Doctor said...
In the past months, I have been reading all the books and web sites on hypochlorhydria I could get my hands on. As I almost died from malnutrition before I figured out what was going on, hypochlorhydria has (unfortunately) become of the utmost importance to me (as you can imagine). I became way too fatigued to participate in any forum discussions but I was avidly reading everything. That's when I stumbled upon these series of articles by Dr. Jonathan Prousky (1, 2, 3).
These articles implicate mitochondrial dysfunction as the cause of hypochlorhydria. Since my stomach problems really worsened after I got CFS, and mitochondrial dysfunction is suspected to be the cause of CFS, I (belatedly) decided to resume the ENTIRE recommended supplement protocol for CFS, this time including megadoses of nicotonic acid AND ribose (plus a good B-100 complex): I started using 3 g of nicotinic acid spread throughout the day as well 20 g of ribose spread throughout the day.
Also see this thread on Niacin treating infections:
http://www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=30&m=1255322