Chocolove
Tournament of the Phoenix - Rise Again
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Overlooked vitamin deficiency can have serious consequences. You might be vitamin deficient despite taking multi-vitamin supplements and eating well.
One experience described by Meg Hartley is very pertinent to us and she is trying to help prevent this from happening to others. As excerpted from her account in: http://www.sheknows.com/health-and-...6225/a-vitamin-deficiency-nearly-paralyzed-me
B12 deficiency is just one of a number of vitamin deficiencies that fly under medical radar. I hope all will think to ask their doctors to test their vitamin and mineral levels for such deficiencies. Such a simple issue can create huge problems.
One experience described by Meg Hartley is very pertinent to us and she is trying to help prevent this from happening to others. As excerpted from her account in: http://www.sheknows.com/health-and-...6225/a-vitamin-deficiency-nearly-paralyzed-me
"I've been sick most of my life and didn't know it until I was 33
This fall, after a lifetime of odd health experiences, I became too sick to do literally anything. Lifting up a book to read or my phone to scroll was too painful for my arms. Sound frequently and intensely irritated me, making binge-watching out of the question. Every time I stood up, blackness would cloud my vision, and I’d be sure I was going to faint. Once I was up and the darkness lifted, I couldn’t walk right. My legs were too weak, and it felt like something was tugging hard on my nervous system, pulling it upward like I was a marionette.
I thought I was dying — and I kind of was. Without a diagnosis, I would have died. I had a total of 33 miserable-making symptoms.
It came on slow. It was tiny aspects of my experience — a cyst here, a rash there. Or other random things, like being clumsy and having to pee all the time. Sometimes it was bigger things, like a mental break or endometriosis symptoms. There were also the ever-increasing changes in my demeanor and level of energy and an electric pain that started as innocuous pins and needles.
I didn’t want to admit something was wrong. So for a while, it was easy to pretend I was fine, but it turns out I’ve been ill for a very, very long time. It’s hard to say exactly how long. I can’t go back in time to give a 10-year-old me with ulcer symptoms a blood test, but that period of pain went unexplained and was consistent with what’s made me so sick now: vitamin B-12 deficiency, of all things.
My symptoms have progressed to funicular myelosis, which is the combined degeneration of the spinal cord. It’s probable that without treatment I would have been paralyzed by now. MRI scans revealed that my brain looks much older than it should, with white foci sitting where they ought not. And six months into treatment, I still can’t walk more than a few minutes without dire punishment."
"misdiagnoses and misconceptions. Vitamin B-12 deficiency mimics many other diseases, and it can look like almost anything, making misdiagnoses rampant. Doctors have also been taught to consider serious B-12 deficiency an old person’s disease....
It can also come from a very common genetic mutation called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, or MTHFR for short. (Apt, isn’t it?)"
"The biggie now is the electric pain; I feel like I’m being electrocuted most of the time. That and if I move too much (barely at all), I lose the ability to walk."
"And as for you, I recommend that if you have any, and I mean A-N-Y, unexplained ailments (including mental illness and infertility) you get your B-12 levels tested. Early B-12 deficiency can look like almost anything, as it affects the nervous system, which is part of everything. Also, find out if you’re a MTHFR, and take the appropriate precautions."
B12 deficiency is just one of a number of vitamin deficiencies that fly under medical radar. I hope all will think to ask their doctors to test their vitamin and mineral levels for such deficiencies. Such a simple issue can create huge problems.
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