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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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So how does raising the head work with two people in the bed- one with POTS and one not (and the one without sleeps on their stomach).
The lifestyle advice for orthostatic intolerance includes raising the head of your bed so that the whole bed is on a tilt. The idea is to both recondition your body and keep fluid in your blood rather than it moving to your bladder and dehydrating you during the night.
Advice varies considerably on how much to raise your bedhead. European Society of Neurology Federation guidelines say 8" to 12". A study on improving orthostatic function in healthy people used 18" and their measures had improved when they were assessed at the end of a week. The benefits are generally supposed to take several days to show up.
Info on how to raise your bed in this thread.
If you have both OI and CFS, please take the poll!
[Administrators, can it be made sticky, please? Also, have I messed up so that individual names will be shown in terms of how people vote? Also, I seem somehow not to have this introductory text above the poll, ermm...]
The link to Dr Levine's Exercise protocol is very helpful. Thank you.Hi there - I have a blog going where I am documenting my progress with Dr. Levine's Exercise protocol, a treatment for POTS (http://potsrecovery.com). As part of the protocol Dr. Levine recommends raising the head of the bed 7-8". I am definitely feeling better and I am mid-way through the protocol. However, I don't know what effect the bed raising has had versus the other parts of the treatment such as exercise, fluid intake and sodium consumption.
When my bed was raised, I had difficulty staying in it. Kept sliding down.
I'm curious. Doesn't this happen to anyone else?