In this episode, I take a new look at “stepping out of your comfort zone” by discussing the importance of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Category: Mental Illness
Got Heavy Metals on the Brain?
I’ll get right to the point. I believe that heavy metal toxicity may be a factor in causing mental illness. There are some natural doctors (based on articles that I found online) who feel the same way. I even found this abstract entitled “Toxic causes of mental illness are overlooked” on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website saying:
“The emerging area of clinical care involving the assessment and management of accrued toxic substances such as heavy metals, pesticides, plasticizers and other endocrine disrupting or neurotoxic compounds has not been fully appreciated by the medical community and has yet to be incorporated into the clinical practice of many consultants or primary care practitioners.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18621076)
Wow!!!!
If heavy metals do play a role in mental illness, than it would be very important to clean them out of the body. Even if you don’t have a mental illness, I don’t think that a metal alloy of mercury, copper, aluminum, and other toxic heavy metals, collecting between the hemispheres of the brain could be a good thing.
What is the best way to detox heavy metals?
There is much information out there on detoxing heavy metals. The source that I trust for diet-related health information is Anthony William, the Medical Medium. I have been passionate about holistic health for nearly 20 years, and no other information has felt more true and in alignment with my understanding of health.
According to Anthony and Spirit, the following five ingredients when taken together on the same day work synergistically to pass the heavy metals all the way out of the body. He has mentioned that other items, like Chlorella, are “messy” and will pick up the heavy metals but drop them before they get all the way out of the body. These five ingredients taken together “pass the football” until it is out of our system:
Ingredient 1: Wild Blueberries – (available in the freezer section of most grocery stores – they must be the small, wild variety, not the larger conventional ones – on Amazon here, or in powdered form on Amazon here).
Ingredient 3: Atlantic Dulse – (available in local health food stores or on Amazon here).
To make the smoothie, we put a couple of bananas, water (or you can use orange juice), and the recommended amounts of the above five ingredients into a blender, and it tastes delicious!!!
To learn more, the heavy metal detox smoothie is outlined in the first Medical Medium book, Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal, which can be found on Amazon here.
You can learn the four main causes of illness and the four main ways of how to protect yourself and the ones you love, by ordering the new Medical Medium book, Life-Changing Foods: Save Yourself and the Ones You Love with the Hidden Healing Powers of Fruits & Vegetables, on Amazon here.
To learn more about heavy metal toxicity and how to detox, check out the Medical Medium blog post here: http://www.medicalmedium.com/blog/heavy-metal-detox
I wish you the best of health always!!!
HMI 006 : Taking Personal Responsibility
In this episode I discuss the importance of taking personal responsibility despite the illness.
Relapse & Post-Traumatic Stress from My Illness?
Relapse
A couple of weeks ago, after a few challenging life events (the death of a family member and getting fired from the yoga studio I was teaching at), I must confess that I had somewhat of a relapse. I’m even hesitant to call it a relapse because in my book I said that I was fully healed from the illness. I was afraid that if I got sick again, that it would invalidate my book and my message. In my book, I say that the mental illness was not my symptoms, but my inability to function. The truth is, over the past few weeks I did lose my ability to function.
The first thing that went was my sleep. Then my thinking became disorganized, to the point that I couldn’t get anything done, or make decisions. However, I felt more mentally clear than I had in any of my previous relapses, and my other symptoms weren’t as terrifying. Whereas normally I take my remedy once per day, I have been taking a high dose of a different remedy four times per day. (The reason I am not specifying which remedy it is, is because homeopathy is individualized medicine, and the remedy that works for me and my illness may not be the one that another person needs.) My wife and I were a little late in catching the onset of the symptoms, so by the time my doctor switched my homeopathic remedy, it took a week to pull me out of it (rather than a couple of days). I have already started returning to work and am functioning in my life again.
While it is hard for me to accept that I had a relapse, this experience did teach me a few things:
- It proved to me once again how amazing homeopathy is. If it were not for homeopathy, I would have been back in the inpatient hospital on multiple psychotropic drugs, and it would have taken me years to recover and get my life back.
- It made me realize how important my mission to help people with mental illness is, and it re-invigorated my passion for the cause.
- It showed me that I may have some post-traumatic stress from my illness and from what I’ve been through.
Post-Traumatic Stress
I recently heard on a radio show that post-traumatic stress is not just the result of war. It can be caused by any stressful situation, depending on how a person is affected by it. During this recent relapse, I felt that I was exhibiting some signs of post-traumatic stress injury. Some of my difficulty with decision-making, my difficulty trusting others, as well as the physical discomfort that I was experiencing, I felt was at least in part due to the trauma that I have endured in my life.
I decided to meet with a therapist about it. He seemed to agree that it was possible, and he recommended a therapy for PTSD called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). He said with PTSD a person gets stuck in one side of the brain, and that EMDR balances the two hemispheres of the brain. A light is used and the person follows the light from side to side with their eyes. He also mentioned that audio with sounds going back and forth from the left ear to the right ear could do the same thing.
I decided to look online for audio that I could listen to on my own, and I found the following album on Amazon:
EMDR Music Therapy Album:
I bought a couple of songs for 99 cents each, and I have to say they are quite amazing! I just listen on my phone (with the Amazon Music app) with headphones, and not only is it very relaxing and pleasant, but I feel that it is very therapeutic.
One thing that I have learned from my over ten years experience with mental illness is that mental illness is not linear. There are ups and downs, detours, steps back and steps forward, and winding roads. We need to be able to “roll with the punches”, adapt, and utilize the resources that we have to the best of our ability, in order to move forward. Human beings are incredibly resilient and can recover from even the harshest of circumstances. I’m in this with you and I truly care about helping people who are suffering to recover. God bless you!
HMI 003 : Why Me? Am I to Blame for My Illness?
In this episode I discuss the concept of karma, the question “why me”, and whether or not I could blame myself for the illness.
HMI 002 : What is Mental Illness? How I Came to Accept that I Had It.
In this episode I discuss how I came to accept that I had a mental illness, and what I realized that mental illness is, aside from a label.
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