@prioris
Thanks, I appreciate that. It's kind of you
See below, posted earlier yesterday by me:
@aquariusgirl and anyone else hitting problems with iodine. You are likely to be experiencing the detoxification of bromide and fluoride, both if which push iodine out of the way and compete for the same receptors.
You need to start at the lowest dose you can get in the Lugol's solution - I found the Heiltropfen 2%, which is 2.5mg per drop, a good starting point.
It is recommended to take the following companion nutrients:
100mg B2 twice a day
500mg B3 twice a day
C.600mg magnesium citrate/glycinate (just avoid mag oxide) a day, in divided doses
200mcg selenium or selenomethionine a day
As much Vit C as you can tolerate, in divided doses and at least an hour away from iodine.
Also, everyone taking iodine (and therefore dislodging bromide) needs to do the salt protocol, too.
This is the use of sea-salt/pink Himalayan salt/ any unrefined salt in water and on food. You take 1/4 tsp in 8oz water first thing, and drink lots of water immediately after taking the salt water. This reduces any potential stress on the kidneys because you will have reduced the concentration of salt.
You can use 1/2 tsp if detox symptoms, which look and feel very similar to hypo-t, hypo-adrenals, chemical sensitivities, etc, are particularly bad.
Repeat throughout the day as necessary, try to stay under a total of 1.5 teaspoons a day,mwhich is approx 2.3g.
The salt thing really, really helps.
For those in the UK, you can get a huge 450g grinder of pink Himalayan salt from £stretcher for £1.99. I grind mine into a lidded pot, keep my 1/4 tsp measure in a beaker, also lidded, and spoon in whatever I need whenever I need it.
Once you get over the initial shifting of bromide (it's used in a great many household products, foods and drinks, the latter more prevalent in the States, where bread and Mountain Dew are two prime offenders, and as a fire retardant in soft furnishings like sofas and mattresses), you'll find you can titrate up quite rapidly.
If you hit really big problems, stop the iodine for two days (pulsing), but keep taking the salt water and the companion nutrients. Resume at the same dose after those 2 days, and if it's still too bad, back off for another 2 days and resume at a lower dose.
The initial impact of even one drop of Lugol's can be profound, so take it slowly and build up gradually.
My first couple of weeks were a bit of a struggle, but the salt helped enormously, and once that bit was over, I went from 2.5mg to a current dose of 52.5mg.
You'll know when the bromide is being excreted because your sweat will smell different and your pee will stink
This is a good thing.
Some people take longer than others to detox bromide and get iodine levels up to normal in all tissues, but Brownstein reckons 6 months at 50mg a day should do it. After repletion, you only need a maintenance dose.
If you're dealing with a specific illness, like cancer, or "any chronic or severe illness", then 100mg or even higher is recommended. It's especially recommended for prostate and breast cancer.
If you look online for a free PDF of Lynne Farrow's "The Iodine Crisis", there's a lot of info about iodine repletion and repletion in there, and it gives a good explanation of why iodine went from being the Universal Medicine to being deemed toxic, courtesy the Wolff-Chaikoff paper and the advent of Big Pharma's new antibiotics in the late 40's/early 50's.
That Weston price article was 99% positive about iodine, and cites far higher doses than I was aware of before.
I saw some on CureZone late night that were in grams rather than milligrams, too. In fact, I've now seen several sources that cite the old c.1930's treatment dose range as being 1-3 grams, which is new information to me and knocks the 2-6 minims I cited out of the park.
I also saw several users on CureZone reporting daily 500mg doses, and experiencing a very "clean, clear, calm" energy, plus countless other health benefits on the "Half Gram Club" dose.
These very, very large doses seem effective for some, though I'd need more investigation and fact-finding before I could be comfortable with more than c.100mg/d, particularly if it was for prolonged use. I'm going to read through more CureZone posts about 500mg plus doses today.
I definitely can't agree with Gaby's arguments, and his claim of the Japanese iodine intake figures being skewed by the use of wet seaweed was roundly refuted by Brownstein and Abraham further down the article, where they state that they got their figures from the Japanese Health Authority, who never use wet-weight and only used dry-weight in the 12.5-13mg iodine figure.
I habitually read as many user reviews of any supplement that I'm curious about. That's generally my starting-point once my interest has been piqued, after which I look for scientific evidence to explain the responses users report. The supplement industry is as much a profit-making machine as the pharmaceutical industry, and can be equally guilty of mis-information, manipulative marketing, etc., so I take all of their information with a fistful of salt. I find personal accounts far more honest.
Whilst many of the "research" papers produced by and for the anti-natural medicine brigade are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, showing clear bias and sometimes blatant terminological inexactitudes (read Ben Goldacre's "Bad Pharma" for more on this), I believe the supplement industry is equally guilty of exaggeration, misinformation, scare-mongering, etc. (read Ben Goldacre's "Bad Medicine" for more on this).
The only meaningful difference I can discern between Big Pharma and the supplement industry is that the former benefits from their products sustaining ill-health, and the latter benefits from their products restoring and sustaining good health. Once users find particular supplements that work for them, they become repeat-business customers. Both industries are profit-making businesses.
The tendency amongst natural health proponents is to blindly believe whatever the natural health industry touts as The Truth, and I find this as unintelligent as trusting Big Pharma's safety and efficacy claims.
It astounds me that health supplements are obliged to prove 25% efficacy before they can be licenced, whilst pharmaceuticals are only required to prove 3% effectiveness. Tamoxifen, the massively damaging but widely prescribed drug given as adjuvant therapy for oestrogen breast cancer, is only 3% effective.
Tamoxifen also blocks the pathway that keeps eyes healthy and ree from cataracts, and directs oestrogen to the uterus as it blocks it from being deposited in breast tissue. Uterine cancer caused by Tamoxifen use is more virulent and far harder to treat than uterine cancer that has developed
sans Tamoxifen.
At 3% effectiveness, that means 97% of women given this drug in any one year won't get any positive benefits from it at all. I find that incredible. I wouldn't have believed it had it not been for my oncologist telling me it was fine for me to stop taking Tamoxifen after less than 2 weeks because, quelle surpris, I'd responded very badly to it, and that what made it ok to stop was that it was "only 3% effective". I even double-checked that his definition of effectiveness matched mine, thinking I must have misunderstood along the way. I hadn't. My chemo was 5% effective, meaning when they gave it to me, with full knowledge of my chemical hyper-sensitivities, there was a 95% chance that it wouldn't have any impact on my cancer. Unbelievable.
My point being that they force far more stringent tests on natural medicine products than they do on pharmaceuticals before allowing them on the market. But then I guess that more MPs are pharmaceutical shareholders than nutraceutical shareholders, so the anomaly shouldn't come as a surprise, really.
I looked at your profile page last night and I see we have a couple of things in common. We are of similar age and the onset of my CFS/ME and fibromyalgia also came before the age of 5, at around age 3, following Scarlet Fever, the deliberate ingestion of a whole prescription tub of my Mother's iron tablets when I was 6 months old (I remember being unable to get the top off the dark-red cardboard container they were in, and sucking the cardboard until I could get to the tablets), plus some traumatic events at the hands of one of my parents' friends. I've been dealing with CFS/ME and fibro for 52 years, so you have 3 years on me
I HAVE to be careful, because I am ridiculously hyper-sensitive to a huge array of substances that Normals take in their stride. I am reknowned at my GP surgery for being "atypical" in my response to meds.
My sensitivities can be so specific as to cause massive facial oedema and all the attendant signs and symptoms of my typical toxicity response (too many to list all here) simply from being given a different brand of the same format of the same painkiller, antibiotic or other drug, or a different format of the same brand of the same drug.
The only upsides are that a) it now gets me out of being prescribed the majority of "dirty", toxic, drugs like amitriptaline, gabapentin, pregabalin, etc. and b) it's the one time when I look like I've had collagen injections in my lips and I get to sport a Trout Pout
Back to iodine. The fact that 52% of the body's iodine stores are in the skin and muscles is one of the things that makes me think iodine deficiency may be connected to the cause of the myalgia part of fibromyalgia. I don't know about you, Prioris, but I feel like I've been regularly beaten with a sledgehammer. Post-chemo, showering became unbearable. The pressure of the water hitting my skin hurts, and I can't bear hot water as I used to, it has to be luke-warm and even then it isn't comfortable.
If someone pats me on the back in greeting, as people are wont to do, it hurts. My thighs, the site for my all-too frequently needed Imigran injections, is so painful now that the injections make me cry in pain. Trying to find one tiny area that hurts less than the rest is extremely painful. I'm hoping that when I reach the right dose of Lugol's, all that will ease, improve, and or completely resolve. It would be nice to have normal muscles and skin again. I did so enjoy a good, hot, power-shower before all this escalated after chemo.
I will, of course, let you (and everyone else here) know. That's the beauty of this forum, the ability to share both knowledge and lessons learned.
Best wishes,
J
