Hip
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Speaking of the desert...who here has went there and how long did you stay for before improving?
Jesus.
Stayed 40 days and 40 nights.
Greatly improved once satan left.
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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, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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Speaking of the desert...who here has went there and how long did you stay for before improving?
You jest, but I've considered bringing this up to my Christian family members when trying to explain my crazy treatmentJesus.
Stayed 40 days and 40 nights.
Greatly improved once satan left.
And I went to a monastery in the remote high desert of northern new mexico and the outdoor air was incredibly healing there, although the living quarters and church were somewhat moldy ...
@Slushiefan The illness seems to be so unique for everyone that it is impossible to say whether desert living will help you or for how long. It also depends on where you go in the desert...
I don't think moving to housing or a city or town in the desert guarantees success. However , I have met very few people thatbhavent had at least some improvement from going to pristine wilderness areas, including desertWould desert living make a substantial improvement?
Would be very much appreciated to have some experiential, anecdotal or even a scientific evidence evidence for this.
My cfs is sever to moderate. I do manage to work by spending 20 percent of my time daily on health treatments (yoga, meds, napping,.research, etc). Almost all my time is spent working and the rest I spend on treatments, sleep, eating... It's our cross to bear.
I live in the bay area and I truly love it here and don't want to leave. But, when the weather is warm and dry I notice a significant improvement. It very quickly gets worse again within a day when things get humid.
This leads to the obvious question, would moving to the desert help cfs? How much if so? And most importantly, would that still be true long term, over a period of years?
To second this, the ideal way to test this is to do a sabbatical without any of your possessions from home. I didn't exactly do this but my reactions were so clear that I didn't feel the need to test them , but ideally you want to bring no items from home as small amounts of contamination can throw your senses offfortunately something you can test for short term affects by traveling to the place you are thinking of moving
It's ttrue that people would move to the west to treat their health issues back in the day. In fact that's part of the reason John Muir and teddy roosevelt were such avid conservationists is that the west helped their personal health issues.There is also a long history of people moving to dry and hot places to treat chronic illness. I'm in Phoenix now where there is a neighborhood that traces its history back to being a place where people with Tuberculosis would live. Going to dry western states was also a treatment for neurasthenia way back in the day.
Would desert living make a substantial improvement?
Would be very much appreciated to have some experiential, anecdotal or even a scientific evidence evidence for this
I guess this may sound wrong to you since Phoenix is civilization but with cities in the desert I'd imagine some are close enough , I have experienced this in parts of vegas, to get desert breezes and feel better than most places. And you may be less reactive than many mold avoiders, which is honestly a great and lucky thing, some can't tolerate Phoenix, although most people agree its better than Tucson and one of the more reasonable southwestern cities to live in air wise.
I am definitely lucky that I can tolerate Phoenix and I recognize that many mold avoiders can't. I think that Erik style mold avoidance and sabbaticals are incredibly important and useful, but at the same time, I don't think it's clear that every person who feels sick in the Bay Area is necessarily having the same mold issues that require that level of avoidance. For some people it might just be the locations effect of living in a damp and polluted place.
To be clear, there are probably a lot of people who would benefit from mold avoidance, and I think anyone who has any reason at all to suspect mold as an issue should try Erik style avoidance if they can. But at the same time, I have met a lot of people that feel better by going somewhere dry or high altitude without any doing any mold avoidance. I think it's worth thinking about location effect independently from mold avoidance, especially for more mild cases.
True. Well I was at the point where i thought i would quickly become as sick as whitney dafoe soon ,and didn't have a career. Even with SSI though it's alltoo expensive. But it's not really a choice. My body was declining a lot more since i did this. Since i got covid in March i have been a lot sicker but "extreme avoidance" before that brought me from bed bound to walking a quarter of a mile and reading/talking a lot without crashing, repeatedly. It wasn't enough on it's own, but I couldn't have gotten progress like that without going to wilderness areas. And all of that isn't necessarily mean uprooting your life forever. I'm sort of an outlier in how hard it's beenfor me to detox and recover. Many people can live somewhere like vegas most of the time and just have to take trips to the nature areas that are so very close. Like thirty minutes away, periodically, to maintain their health, which is not a terrible tradeoffFor some people, it doesn't make sense to give up their career and leave civilization to get from 80% to 100% functioning. At the same time, moving to Phoenix or some other dry, hot city would allow that same person to keep working and maybe get to 90 or 95% without sacrificing too much.
Hi @Mouse girl it is nice to meet you, my name is DanielI also think how homes are built really can play into how healthy they are. the newer homes with slab foundations and the newer windows, don't let air ciruculate. In my old home with a raised foundation and old wonden window that let lots of drafts in created a healthier environment. I also lived in a very hot and dry part of Los Angeles. Even though the house had some leaks due to old toilet seals leaking, i didn't get sick because of the raised foundation. In a house i rented with a slab foundation and in more humid area, i felt so much worse. it also had the newer window so no fresh air leaking in all the time. I would give anything to go back to live in my old old house that others saw as run down mess but it was amazing. just needed some work.