Can you tell me more about the less fluid thing....I am fluid loading for POTS issues but i have EDS, so I am curious...sometimes I crave salt and sometimes I don't. My bp went up on florinef but my symptoms did not improve.
According to Dr. Bell, the whole Florinef, salt loading, drinking water protocol has had a "mixed" record. That was back in 1990. Not that it hasn't helped some people. But i felt, for me, that Florinef was too much like taking an actual stimulant (like Ritalin), and maybe that was the reason some people were getting benefit. It was just charging up your CNS. But that's just my experience.
The "brain fluid" theory, I discussed above, assumes that you have compromised neural fluid ducts. They are weak, floppy, get kinked, stenosis, because your tissue is weak, becuse you have EDS. So when that happens, the brain fluid backs up in the brain, and you end up with "idiopathic intracranial hypertension" (IIH) or too much fluid pressure squeezing on your brain.
According to an iron law of neurology (Monro-Kellie Hypothesis) you brain can only tolerate so much content: be it brain fluid, tissue, or blood. If you have too much brain fluid pressure, due to IIH, then your body will instinctively cut back on the flow of blood ot your brain.
It's just common sense: your brain is like a sealed box, and if you try and overfill it with stuff, it is going to crack, or start leaking somewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monro-Kellie_rule#The_Monro-Kellie_hypothesis
Patients with IIH sometimes show a flattened pituitary gland (Empty Sella Syndrome), because the hyper-pressure on the gland squashed it flat. Usually these patients are obese women. But former owner of this website, Cort Johnson (not an obese female) had it, and he wondered if it had something to do with CFS. Many other patients posted they had ESS also. It does seem to have some correlation with many CFS symptoms.
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/empty-sella-syndrome-and-cfs-a-patient-study.8616/
Dr. Driscoll has, on her website (prettyill.com) has recommended a trial with the diuretic Diamox. Diamox is used regularly by opthamologists for glaucoma patients, because it shrinks the aqueous solution in the eyeball. So there's no doubt it dries out orbital vessels above your neck. It will shrink the brain fluid in your cranium. Within in a week, NASA research has found, your brain will have replaced excess brain fluid with cerebral blood. They learned this from returning astronauts.
The virtues of trying the Diamox protocol are: it is very cheap, it is non-narcotic, it is a proven diuretic, and if it doesn't work for you, you can quit anytime. There are no tens of thousands to be paid ot specialist docs, or extremely expensive exotic meds that you have to pay for. The key to a Diamox is to start
with very small doses, and try and keep your body alkaline, because Diamox seems to work best in a alkaline body.
