les genser
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Posts posted by les genser
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For Heal the Accursed (really?? how...biblical):
A 1:2 extract is just a really concentrated tincture. I am not all all sure of the effectiveness of the herb with the alcohol removed. You need alcohol as a solvent to extract the herb, but removing it is usually done by heating which I am theorizing damages the active chemicals. I have noted this before as some folks have not had a good experience with DGL or alcohol removed products. Try it; you'll know right away if its working or not.
Licorice root functions as a cycle breaker. Taken remedially 3X daily at the very onset of a cycle, there are a range of possible outcomes, all of which have been reported by people: 1. It will break up and abort the cycle completely 2. It will sharply reduce the number and severity of headaches and eliminate some types (i.e. 'night hits') but not others 3. It will reduce headaches but not remove 'shadows' (CH associated TG and other neuralgias.)
Taken as an abortive, it will interrupt a headache cycle at the hypothalamus, preventing a full blower. However, those shadow neuralgias can be a bitch to get rid of and need to be mechanically aborted.
We are not just chemical factories, though, and CH has many dimensions as do most disorders. The true value of a therapy such as licorice root or busting is that it provides breathing room. It is vitally necessary to pay attention to yourself, your physical person, your emotional self. It is a lot easier to pay attention to your body when it is not trying to kill you.
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For Yury: Buono sera. I'm sure he's a wonderful person but Dr. Leone sounds like the Michael Bay of pharmaceuticals. (For our non American friends, the pop cultural reference refers to film director Michael Bay's penchant for huge, unnecessary explosions as a substitute for story development or substantive content. Brought to you as a public service). The I need a bigger hammer approach will never work in the long run.
I have an acquaintance with Parkinsons who had electrodes and a pacemaker installed at Hopkins, and so far it has made a huge difference for him, so I have an appreciation for the value of that sort of technique, but it is not what you would call a solution. It does nothing to remove the problem, it just builds a bridge around it, if you get what I mean.
There is new research out which the establishment is not at all happy with which demonstrates that many of the most commonly used and prescribed antidepressants, etc. are absolutely useless; no better than placebos (and the placebo effect explains why they seem to work at all). If you take into account a placebo effect, which can run as high as slightly over 50%, and then factor in the pharm industries own estimates of the percentage of people their meds (for cluster) are effective for, and then additionally factor in the percentage of time that they (admittedly) just don't work for various unknown reasons, then you arrive at the unmistakeable conclusion that hitting yourself in the head with a rock might be an equally effective approach.
I'm not mad at big pharm because their stuff doesn't work.
I'm mad at them because they are the modern equivalent of 19th century patent medicine hucksters selling bottles of snakeheads in tobacco juice as cure alls. I'm mad at them precisely because they do know that their stuff doesn't work and they do not care.
The fast food industry produces lethal garbage which makes people fat and sick and they don't care.
Even the entertainment industry produces crap, which they know to be crap, which they market anyway cause we buy it and they don't care.
I don't want to go all Network here but for F's-sake we deserve better, and we will get it only when we call the bastards out.
Step one: Stop taking ineffective and systemically damaging medications that are not helping and probably aggravating your condition. Use methods and materials provided by the Earth herself to obtain real relief and show the medical establishment and their other victims that their perceived hegemony is an illusion. Stop allowing your doctor to treat you like he's hitting himself with that little rubber hammer..reflexively. Rote prescription of ineffective drugs with all the information out there is inexcusable from people who get paid a good chunk of change for their 'wisdom' and whose first tenet is 'do no harm'.
AAAAHHH. I need to go find some kittens.
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Well if we are done playing whats the Fireman got in his pockets, I think I understand somewhat the non reliance on O2. I too worked in a similar environment, not in an office, where you could find yourself anywhere. I would not have wanted to rely on anything I couldn't carry in my pockets. These awful energy drinks did not exist back in the day, but I would have had a bandolier of them, a bottle of horse aspirins, and likely an assortment of cafergot m&ms. I would have done isometric things to raise O2 levels and divert blood flow from my head. Sometimes adrenaline would have served as an instant abortive. Most of the time I would just tough it out. It sucked, but even if I knew Oxygen would work there was no way I could have carried it around. I actually spent lots of energy trying to hide the fact that anything was wrong with me at all. Stupid.
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Their tanks, Scott packs and such contain air mixtures like scuba tanks do and not highly combustion reactive oxygen.
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Hi Yury. I can provide a more substantive answer, but I do wish to know why precisely you are taking an antiseizure med.
To use practically any busting strategy spoken of here it is best if not essential to detox from pharmaceuticals first. What you describe, the tincture working right off and then setting off an S-storm, if a pretty typical picture of licorice root meets toxic chemical whose presence it does not enjoy. Do not take it while using verapamil.
The antiseizure med is in reality a triptan not marketed in the US, a serotonin agonist NOT to be taken with licorice root. Previous paragraph goes double here.
The remainder of the answer depends on why you were prescribed verapamil and the triptan. If it was solely for cluster, read on.
I cannot give you medical advice.
If it was me though, I would stop taking the verapamil and titre down the triptan instantly. You will get rebound hits. Ride them out. It is not pretty or easy but its also not as bad as you are afraid of. Use any mechanical abortives you can think of but nothing chemical other than caffeine. You can start using licorice root carefully 48 hours after stopping the meds, the tincture will start balancing serotonin levels. If you wish to use the other lovely plant products you have, the tincture will not likely interfere if you stop taking it while actively busting.
In trying to empathically experience the combination of those two chemicals in my own body, I gave myself a swift case of the creeps. If they were prescribed for no other medical condition than cluster, the combination of the two is particularly offensive, and they are a significant part of your problem. I mean my problem, since this is just what I would do, personally.
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There is a precept I like which says " when the student is ready, the teacher appears." The teacher comes in many guises, infrequently as a wizened sage but far more likely as a random line from a friend, or something overheard, seen, felt, read or chanced upon. I have learned one thing. The trick is to pay attention, and that is harder than it seems.
Sometimes what you learn is that your body is way smarter than you are, but it loves you anyway.
I honestly didn't get the Beaver reference (someone is always bringing up beavers; forget the Cleavers this is starting to go way Twin Peaks). But then again, it was probably Freudian as June Cleaver terrified me as a child. The original Stepford wife. Nobody's mom I knew looked like that. Baking cookies in cocktail dresses and hooker heels. And Ward? JTFC the two of them are the pictures they show new pod people to get them to be perfect pod people. You know they had a cub scout collection in the basement. And that goes double for Donna Reed. I have issues.
In all honesty, I pulled Justin Bieber out of my... well, just say I picked a name of someone whose name I knew as a banal but inoffensive pop star type, attractive I presume to very young girls too young to want to have sex with vampires. Someone whose very mention in the same sentence with the prince of darkness would amplify the ridiculousness of the association. Not 'The Association', the 60s rock band whose hits include 'Windy' and 'Along Came Mary', I mean the association. But I digress.
Obviously I have underestimated the gravity of invoking the name. Much like Death Eaters will appear when the name of Voldemort is pronounced, I have heard that certain fanatic denizens of the Bieberverse will hacker-like materialize in your system for your transgression and flood it with bad fan fiction and awful poetry, heavy on the mist and wild horses.
Were I to dissappear mid-diatribe, you'll know what really happened.
You may indeed ask yourselves just exactly how medicated am I this evening.
Seriously, thanks to all who even read that confession of sorts. If its helpful at all it is as I intended. I hope everyone has a lovely weekend. In the infinity of solution, we shall all be well.
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I don't know... I take the concept of institutional, ordained by the cosmos evil (personified I suppose by Satan) about as seriously as I take Justin Bieber, which is to say not at all. I suppose in a circular and unnecessarily obtuse fashion I was trying to say that I don't believe pain to be 'evil'.
My sincere apologies to Justin Bieber who I'm certain is a nice enough kid, whoever he is.
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yury:
1. Ask your doctor about potential interactions.
2. What specifically is the 'anti epileptic'; do you have a diagnosed seizure disorder?
3. Is the calcium an antihypertensive?
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Hi folks.
Thought I would chime in with a confession of stupidity, followed by a few thoughts I will throw out for consideration.
Stupid first: As well as I am convinced that licorice root works, it has one seeming glaring inadequacy in that it does not do much to alleviate the associated neurogenic pain syndromes referred to variously as shadows, triggers, neuralgias. etc.. Not everyone gets these things, or gets them to the same extent but if you do, and you know who you are, you know they are half of your problem with cluster, and once they kick in they are hard to get rid of. I have worked at trying to find an effective agent to combat these things, and in a manner of speaking, I have succeeded. By literally doing nothing.
I obviously need to explain. Here comes the stupid part. I started smoking (cigarettes) when I was 16, and a few years later developed cluster headaches. Over the years more than one person has suggested a link between the smoking and the headaches but I dismissed it out of hand. I even thought of tobacco as 'first aid' for clusters in that the vasal dilation was a good thing. For all I go on about rebound and pendulums balancing I was apparently immune to my own BS. And so I eventually found the licorice root, and success except for the shadow/trigger/neuralgia things that of late had been seemingly getting worse. All this time, please understand I have been a perpetually 'quitting' smoker, sometimes heavier and sometimes not, but never being able to just give it up.
And then last week I read with portents of doom the links re nicotine that the bb posted and my giant infantlike denial was no longer possible. I'm sure the least astute among you knows where this is going.
To make this tolerably brief, I stopped cold, waited 48 hours to detox from the nicotine and then decided to keep a journal of triggers and shadows, so here it is:
Pardon the theatrics. There were none. I don't mean they were reduced, or diminished, or less noticeable, I mean they literally frigging disappeared. It is now just about 7 days from detox. On the one hand I am thrilled. On the other, I am facing the distinct probability that approximately 50% of the agony I have endured over 37 years has been self inflicted through willful ignorance. That, my friends, is world class stupidity.
Now for the thoughts. Obviously, smoking was a huge trigger for me but not everyone smokes, and even people who do may not be triggered by smoking. What is the commonality?
Pain is a language we do not understand. Pain is the body communicating desperately in a language that we have trained ourselves to trivialize and ignore. We make heroes out of the people who are most successful at this. We have entire industries devoted to stamping out pain with a capital P, the most insidious capital E- vil right up there with Satan and Justin Bieber.
Doctors fear pain and do not speak the language. Until recently they were inclined to think of pain as an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the practice of their art, and well, just one of those things.
We're all just as bad. We are inclined to largely think of ourselves as heads in troublesome meat and bone carrying cases, and we are inconvenienced when they demand attention.
As the great Alan Watts said, (about hallucinogens, actually) when you get the message you hang up the phone. When I ran out of stupid and stopped the smoking the pain stopped.
I don't mean this to be facile or oversimplifying generalization in any way. Our collective causations are complex, individual, emotional, chemical, energetic and environmental.
But the pain is not punishment. It is communication, and when we understand it, we will have done something.
I really think everyone would benefit from reading Dr. Gabor Mate's "When the Body Says No" on the connection between stress, emotion, and illness.
And now, I must away. I have thirty five minutes of 4/20 left, my lovely, intelligent and fearlessly honest wife has gone to her mothers, and I have just received disc two of the third and last season of Kung Fu. I have waited since 1974 to find out how the story ends. I may be stupid, but I am also very patient.
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maddie;
If you can find an illustration of a hypothalamus you will notice that the trigeminal nerve passes directly through the central tuberal region of the hypothalamus. The eye, through the optic nerve, is also directly coupled to the hypothalamus through the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Forget the big words, my point is you do not have separate conditions; the TG neuralgia etc. are part and parcel and secondary to the CH. It all becomes one large feedback loop and any part of it can trigger any other part.
Treating the CH as a side effect of the neuralgia is a mistake.
Busting with hallucinogens, or using licorice root will remove the hypothalamus from the loop. The TG or other neurogenic pain is, sadly, much harder to get rid of. Busting or LR should greatly reduce the frequency and severity of hypothalamically generated CH and make the TG pain far easier to deal with. Without the actual headaches, the TG triggers are much easier to identify. Nerve complexes that become chronic pain loops are difficult to deal with, and virtually impossible for pharmaceuticals to touch. Everyone knows I dislike pharmaceuticals, but in this case statistics and research bear me out. Apparently, your experience does as well. Drugs will not solve your problem, and in fact are in all likelihood complicating it through side effect and rebound.
Have you tried acupuncture? Trigger point acupuncture can be highly effective in releasing chronically held tension in the shoulder and neck muscles often affected and/or causative in the CH/TG merrygoround. It put me in remission for two years. Massage is very helpful, as are other lifestyle/ behavior changes you can make to reduce your stress level and eliminate triggers.
I know its hard to think of these things when all you really want to do is drop kick your head a hundred yards, but the clusters are something you can treat first and that makes the TG pain much more manageable.
At least that has been my experience, and I've been carrying pretty much the same syndrome you describe for 37 years.
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Hey, thebb... want to get angrier? True story...
When the controlled dangerous substance act was written, then Pres. Nixon did not give a rats' ass about 'legitimate medical usage'. Marijuana, LSD and the other psychedelics were placed on sched. 1 because they were the drugs of choice of the people Nixon hated the most, the anti-war hippies who were ruining his life and had him foaming at the mouth. Marijuana is described as a 'hallucinogen', which it of course is not. The only other CDS1 class of drugs is heroin and other opiate alkaloids considered too dangerous to use. Opium and derivatives are sched.2. Whats hilarious is that bufotenine is a schedule 1 CDS, which would theoretically make walking down the street with a cane toad under your arm a class A federal crime, since they ooze bufotenine through their pores.
As someone who worked in this particular area of government some years ago, I can tell you that the war on drugs is a completely counterproductive travesty; a failure on any level you choose to look. I can also state confidently that it is rightly perceived as political suicide for any elected official to say that publicly, or suggest reform. By and large, friends, we do not live in a particularly enlightened society. How else can you explain our totally schizophrenic acceptance of the most abused drug in the nation (alcohol) and all the damage it causes while people get twenty years for 20 grams of weed?
I don't mean to pee on anyone's campfire, but don't look for intelligent drug policy from our government. I mean have you seen those guys?
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For CH Father:
I finally read that thread re: the vitamins and the fish oil.
Short answer: I don't see anything that would preclude someone from using both.
I would, however point out that the giant dose is probably unnecessary. More than the system can absorb, of any vitamin, is simply excreted and can be hard on the liver.
The licorice root would probably act in a complementary fashion, since as you know it inhibits cortisol depletion (the body's most potent anti-inflammatory) and depresses mast cell (histamine) activity.
I hope this answers the question. Sorry I took so long.
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I'll try to get to everything, but I have to make an observation first. Why is everyone surprised when this works? We as a species are really impressed with ourselves and our technological acumen. Our computers, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals are really hot stuff. Well, apologies to Jeopardy, but no computer can perform the calculations to get up and walk across a room like any two year old can. Bees routinely instantly calculate the shortest route between flowers (the 'traveling salesman' problem) which the fastest computer would take days to figure out. Geneticists high five each other for roundup resistant crops (another classic arrogant mistake-in-the making, just wait) and it's obvious that most of the medical establishment thinks the answers to everything are in some high tech white and chrome future fantasy where the lab techs all look like Disney princesses in white coats,no one ever farts, and the drug ads all have dolphins in them ("Just like nature intended....only better!!!").
And now for some reality. Some science type needs to correct me on this, because I can't remember the exact percentage, but you might not be aware that we as humans share something like 90% of our genome with Oak trees, and every other life form on earth. Scientists do not understand what this stuff is or what it does, they call it "junk DNA", and it apparently is independent of the two percent or so of our genetics that make us humans rather then squirrels. I don't know what it does either, but I can tell you what that 90% means to me..the Lakota have a phrase for it, they say 'mitakuye oyasin', meaning "all my relatives", or we are all related. We have all co-evolved on this planet for billions of years (sorry creationists). We all belong here. Everything we need is here, if we don't kill it, poison it, burn it or shit on it first. No laboratory in the world, with unlimited funds and unlimited genius, could synthesize within an order of magnitude anything remotely as complex and elegantly designed as the licorice plant. We are basically family.
Anyway, I could have saved us all a lot of time by simply saying nature is smarter than we are. Of course it works.
OK enough fooling around.
Dave: HCTZ is a diuretic, and my therapeutic manual specifically warns against licorice use with diuretics as it inhibits fluid loss and increases potassium loss. The same manual advises 'cautious' use with antihypertensives as it may inhibit their activity. As always, ask your doctor or better yet a good pharmacist. A well made tincture has an indefinite shelf life if kept away from heat and sunlight.
Rob: Unless Babou is a Mycologist get a really good book and go with someone who knows their S. I don't want to have to tell you how good milk thistle is for amanita poisoning. Just kidding; I wish I could go too. But be careful.
Trying to figure patterns can make you nuts. I started at about 18 as a chronic, morphed into a long cycle episodic for many years,went into remission for two years and came back as a suicide chronic.
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Richard,
The middle of the night between bouts of agonizing pain is not the best time to think clearly. Drop your doctors and meds? probably a good idea, as you have clearly determined they are not helping you. To assume there is nothing else you can do is an error.
I spent thirty seven years in cluster land, alone. Doctors were of no help. In all that time, I met exactly one other cluster sufferer in the flesh. One. We are not exactly ubiquitous.
In this place are people who not only understand your situation, but have some pretty good ideas about how to improve it. If someone, somewhere, proposed trance channeling with gerbils strapped to your head to cure clusters, I guarantee you somebody here tried it. Besides me.
Alright, I jest, but the cumulative expertise makes this place the Mayo clinic of the cluster universe. No person here is going to berate you for bitching about it, either.
In fact, I would insist on it. Anger can be very therapeutically useful in managing pain. Are you angry at the Doctors who blithely handed you useless script after useless script for a condition they don't understand? good.
Are you perhaps angry at yourself for surrendering responsibility for your own health to others who don't feel the pain at all? better.
A journey begins with a single step. You have already decided not to be a victim of the medical establishment any longer. Take the next step; read, experiment, try. (Not the gerbils, though. I made that up.) Decide not to be a complacent victim of your own (understandable as it is) despondency.
Know what my favorite thing about this place is? Not the knowledge, compassion or love of the people, though all three abound. Its the unfailing good humor, the steadfast refusal to allow this debilitating condition to rob us of the dignity and nobility of life. Nobody here even owns a white flag.
That alone is reason enough to stay here, and I hope you do.
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Ron... back in the day, at various points in the extraction process (wisely not mentioned, its kind of dangerous; not meth lab dangerous but just the same..) vegetation like parsley or grunt weed could be used to wipe resin residue out of the extraction containers and then smoked. Yeehah.
That's probably what you had. I've had it myself and I agree, its the furthest I've ever been.
If acid is a string quartet, DMT is a symphony orchestra on crack.
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OK; I've got a suggestion but first a short answer to the question "but Les... why do you keep pushing the Skullcap?"
Well, I'm glad you asked. Skullcap was first used as a folk remedy for rabies in the 19th century ( it truly does have excellent anti-spasmodic properties). It didn't cure rabies,of course, but the interest generated led to discovery of its real properties. Skullcap is a mint, and like many mints it is classed as a nervine. To quote herbalist and author Michael Moore (no not him) "it is a sure treatment for almost any nervous system malfunction of a mild or chronic nature, from insomnia to fear to nervous or sick headaches, and as a basic palliative-restorative when pasturing out from stress."
You can see what attracted me to it. It has a mild sedating effect and eases stress-based muscle tension and spasm. It is, for all these reasons, also very useful in treating addictions of all kinds. And, it does all this with virtually no downside.
I believe the complementarity of these two herbs for cluster is important. When I take one, I take the other.
(By the way, this combination is my treatment of choice for the emotional and nervous problems associated with PMS. Again, highly effective, inexpensive, safe and side-effect free. And organic.)
Which leads me to my suggestion:
Take them both together, all the time. ("Sedative" in the pharmaceutical sense is a bad word, but the skullcap calms and reinforces. Have no fear of passing out behind the wheel, it absolutely does not induce drowsiness).
I truly don't mean to be using you as my science fair project, but you are a good observer and I would be very interested to see if anything changes. It can't hurt.
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LT2:
Thank you. If I understand you correctly, you are of the opinion that the frequency of your hits has lowered, especially at night, but the character of the attacks you do get are the same as they have been previously?
If you can tell, are the current attacks any easier to abort or the same as they have always been?
At least you seem better off at night. They were the worst. I used to be afraid to go to bed; I would stay up hoping to avoid them, but two hours after going to sleep, bang.
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Thanks for the info CH Dad, I'll look into it later. Have to go this AM but I have questions for LT2:
1. When you say major hits could you be more specific as to character, intensity, where you feel them originating, how easy they are to get rid of?
This would be very useful to me. Thanks.
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Arcan: I am not really familiar with the D3 therapy so I can't really say, but I will look into it. I think if you start the tincture when your next cycle starts (we can always hope it won't) you will not have to resort to anything else. Your linguistic skills are excellent, by the way, and I bet you speak fluent German and French as well. I speak English and fluent Hillbilly. We Americans tend to be provincial.
For my friend up in Vansterdam: Its not too often I get to laugh at posts on this forum, so thank you. I'm happy for you that you are seemingly on the downslope, and I hope your long remission is very long indeed. "Less offensive" than Fox News probably includes just about everything on TV, with the possible exceptions being Jersey Shore and that Redneck wedding show, and maybe {self editor's note: I started listing things and realized that at least 90% of TV programs are more or less completely offensive one way or another, and I felt myself getting stupider just thinking about them, so I stopped before I blew a head pipe}. I will, at least in spirit, toast your remission with a Beaver Buzz.
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It is a synthetic glucocorticoid steroid 30 times more powerful than cortisol. It is therefore an antiinflammatory and it has legitimate uses. It is extremely dangerous, can cause suppression of natural immune response, "roid rage", suppressed adrenal function and suppression of the pituitary/adrenal axis. I can find no literature supporting its use in cluster, which makes his prescription totally off label. It seriously messes with the HPA axis, and not in a good way. I'm sorry this response is short but I have no time this AM.
Ask your doctor to justify prescribing this. In my opinion the potential dangers far outweigh any feasible benefit (which I don't see at all). It seems a real idiot move to me, and I wouldn't take it.
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OK.
For CH Father: I may be entirely wrong, but after thinking about this I believe that in episodics the hypothalamus is 'synched' except when in cycle and therefore would not benefit from any kind of prophylaxis. If there's nothing wrong, the licorice root is just going to improve your mood and detoxify your liver.I do think a protocol like the one described above started early in an episodic cycle would abort it completely. One of the things that perplexes me the most is what the essential difference is (and there has to be one) between episodic and chronic people. I suspect it may have something to do with the sensitivity of the 'feedback loops' that trigger us, which would of course vary from individual to individual.
For Arcan:
Love the name. Feels like addressing the Vulcan ambassador. Anyway, verapamil side effects are extensively documented. Just Google it, and be assured unless you are in fact a Vulcan you will experience many of the effects listed if you stay on it long enough. You will also have to increase the dose as you develop tolerance. "Tolerance" in drug speak is misleading. You are not 'tolerating' a substance, your body is trying desperately to normalize its function in the throes of chemical invasion. Verapamil is used primarily to treat cardiac arrhythmia, angina and hypertension. It relaxes smooth muscle (blood vessels) resulting in dilation (note this) which lowers blood pressure. Some genius decided it would be valuable in cluster and migraine because in those conditions, edematous blood vessels cause pain. That's correct, as far as it goes, but its ass backwards. In cluster, blood vessels swell because the surrounding tissues (muscle, mucous membrane, sinuses, etc.) become congested and tense and restrict the flow in the capillaries, which swell up in order to maintain flow. Ever kink a garden hose and see what happens to the pressurized side? same thing.
When the fire department shows up, they don't spray the smoke. Verapamil does not address the cause of your pain at all, it is a drug of diminishing returns, its prescription is based on a mistaken perception of CH etiology. It is fundamentally useless for us and yet is prescribed by the truckload.
This is a fact: No pharmaceutical in current use addresses the known causative factors in CH. They only affect 'downstream' symptoms and do not reduce the number or character of subsequent hits. I believe in many situations through rebound (the system trying to normalize) they make subsequent hits worse.
LSD, psylocibin containing mushrooms, LSA containing plant materials, BOL 148 and the humble licorice root all act directly on the actual causes of CH. Anything which does not act directly within the HPA axis is spraying the smoke.
Always remember the research behind these drugs, including their efficacy and safety, has been paid for by the pharm companies, and the dickless wonders at the FDA pretty much take their word for everything since they have no means of doing anything else. Doctors are not pharmacologists and take the word of a sales rep with a BA in marketing (Google Bill Hicks while you're at it). To paraphrase Mel Brooks, drug companies have killed more people than Cecil B. DeMille. These are the people who invent drugs, and then invent diseases for the drugs to "cure". You trust them, right?
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We are experiencing internet phone tag.
1. You are right completely, Licorice root should not be used with near or around verapamil. I am really quite adamant about this, and I will gladly take whatever crap anyone wants to give me, but verapamil should only be prescribed for hypertension (and there are better drugs for that too) and never for cluster headache. I could go on for pages with reasons why, but suffice it to say that it is rote prescribing, an off label use of a dubious drug, loaded with potential deleterious effects, based on faulty understanding of CH causation and etiology, and it does NOTHING that can't be done by Oxygen or meditation for that matter without any side effects. If your doctor gives it to you, tell him to take it.
2. Imitrex is another one. Also, do not use licorice tincture in its presence. Another bastard child drug, it acts downstream of the hypothalamus to shrink blood vessels as a 5HT serotonin agonist. This is effective treatment for migraine, in which the vessels swell and the edema gets locked in for hours. Not so much for cluster; its like throwing darts blindfolded. Sometimes it works. It does not address any causative factors of CH. No pharmaceuticals in current use do. Licorice root, as a serotonin uptake inhibitor, would have unpredictable and probably unpleasant interaction with imitrex.
As to your other musings, I think I may have touched on them, but it would be perfectly safe to take licorice root once a day as a tonic, but I don't know if it would be effective or necessary.
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A short rant, because I have to. Time magazine just ran a special on pain, many of you have probably seen it, and by and large it was ok until I got to the 'alternative treatments' article which was written by an idiot. After noting that many herbs had names which sounded like they came from 'The Shire' and completely ignoring proven analgesic herbs his conclusion was that the effectiveness of herbal remedies is not supported by medical science. This would be the same medical science, presumably, that extensively uses morphine (opium poppy), cocaine (coca), digitalis (foxglove... 'discovered' by an English doctor who weaseled the secret out of a witch. True story) and literally hundreds of others in daily use. WTF? I was pissed and was close to writing a letter to the editor, but I decided to go on living my life instead. And rant here. One mourns the sad state of journalism in this country.
Sorry.
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Licorice root is not something you want to be taking all the time, as a preventative. I would be uneasy about taking it at therapeutic doses for more than 4-6 weeks for two reasons: First, the possibility of cumulative adverse effects as detailed elsewhere (see, you have to read it anyway) and second, receptor number and type and quality in the hypothalamus would begin to be affected as I believe they are with long term pharm use. That is exactly what we wish to avoid.
The tincture works very quickly and you should be able to nip your cycle in the bud. If you are fortunate and get 'early warning' shadows, start it then.
As I am a chronic, I don't have experience of shutting down a cycle personally so the more data the better.
Try this as a protocol:
1. At onset of cycle, take as directed 3X daily, with skullcap if desired (I would).
2. When you no longer notice shadows cut down to two doses per day. Eliminate the one during the period you get hit the least (morning, afternoon) but do not eliminate the evening dose.
3. If you remain PF, eliminate everything but the evening
dose and you can cut that too after 3 weeks or so.
4. Shadows and triggering events will not completely disappear, and in fact you will notice them more because they are not camouflaged by a cluster. A single dose of tincture when this happens is insurance against escalation, but if you're not near it when it happens don't panic, its happened to me and you can abort the triggers other ways. The licorice root metabolizes quickly and does not linger in your system, but the beneficial effects seem to last way past its active half life.
Let us know how you make out.
a potential new option
in General Board
Posted
One more thing I should have mentioned, two really as this has come up again recently:
1. Licorice root will work best for people who do not have a heavy recent history of pharmaceutical use, particularly SSRIs.
2. DO NOT under any circumstances use licorice root concurrently (or even close to, ever) with triptans such as imitrex or with verapamil. You may find out exactly what is meant by 'cluster headache'.
I need to say this now and again, but when you take a dose of this tincture, it absorbs very quickly. Within 20 minutes you will feel it affecting your blood pressure. You will feel it affecting your mood. It is a powerful substance which reacts with several classes of prescription drugs, so ask your Doctor if you're not sure, and then ask me anyway cause I don't trust them where herbs are involved.