Hopefully I'll recover even a little bit and be able to do more work figuring out why these things work...
"tocovit" (A mixed tocopherols product extracted from wheat germ oil... form of vitamin E)
This helped temporarily, often, increased appetite and subjective feeling of warmth along with decreasing shortness of breath and slightly increasing activity threshold
"lapodin"
a product that contained a mixture of emodin and beta-lapachone. Emodin is supposed to help with constipation but also supposedly oxidative metabolism in general.
@Hip and others have noted that it can also be a purinergic receptor antagonist, similar to suramin, but at doses higher than I was using.
This gave similar feeling of increased warmth and slightly increased activity threshold, and decrease in symptoms in general, temporarily
Bag Breathing:
This one's an odd one. It's based on ideas about carbon dioxide and metabolism. I've done it both for anxiety symptoms and just for overall pain and air hunger/shortness of breath... It tends to help with both , to an extent. Not a miracle cure. But it should have a similar effect as carbogen, acetazolamide, etc
ProgestE
This is just progesterone in some kind of MCT or coconut oil and vitamin E/tocopherols
I've used this a lot, recently, maybe too much. There are a couple odd side effects that I'm not quite sure why or when they pop up, but since it's helped more than it's hurt and nothing much has helped recently, I still keep using it despite the side effects. One of the side effects that's well-documented is a decrease in sex drive for males, i think. I've gotten this but it doesn't matter because i'm way too sick to have relationships. I haven't grown breasts yet, haha. apparently using with DHEA or other androgen-promoting substance can easily counter the feminizing effects if they do occur.
it helps with pain and I think overall with metabolism/activity tolerance.
High dose thiamine:
I took 2000 mg of thiamine hcl a couple of times.
It increased warmth and feelings of energy, but I also had a couple heart palpitations.
Possibly from nutrient deficiency, like magnesium or something.
Coffee/caffeine
I know I'm going to get some disapproval for this one.
When I first got sick, I tried to use the stimulants I was already prescribed (for ADHD) to help with energy. This didn't really help and I had odd reactions to them. But coffee seemed to, without the same side effects.
When I've been very severely sick, I often have intense trouble even forming a thought and have an all-encompassing discomfort that is not exactly pain, but is perhaps even worse than pain in a sense--it's hard to describe, feels like my tissues are dry and desiccated or just like I'm already dead, rigid, etc. Often when I have this, even though I'm severely fatigued, I can't sleep. one of the only things that helps is small amounts of caffeine, which alleviate this feeling and allow me to sleep.
I had been thinking that less caffeine would be good until I read this:
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/caffeine.shtml
Caffeine is a mitochondrial uncoupler, like aspirin, or thyroid hormone. It increases metabolism, and thus you're supposed to have some form of sugar/starch with it, otherwise it can cause negative symptoms. Once I started having coffee with milk and sugar, or with fruit/starch, it alleviated any negative reactions I've had from it. Hopefully if I try thyroid it will lower the amount of coffee I have , but until then it's one of the only things that has helped me bear all of this. It doesn't make me very stimmed out or wired--just alleviates pain, shortness of breath, allows me to relax fully.
