Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Blog post on anxiety/panic disorders



http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/jokers-wild/?emc=eta1


A friend of mine sent me this article written by Paul Vandevelder about panic attacks which is very insightful.   I relieved many of the experiences that the author described.   For me, at the pinnacle it is best described as in the Book of Revelation in which the 7 headed dragon with 10 horns was arising from the abyss.   It is difficult for the uninitiated to understand what panic attacks do to your perception of reality, but for those who have experienced this it all makes sense.

A relative who recently experienced these, who failed to understand my experience, now fully understands the awful nature of these storms.  Fortunately for both myself and him, panic attacks are no longer part of our lives in which the key is nutrition.   Panic attack arise from adrenal exhaustion which occurs due to many factors the first is stress and that is unrelenting stress.   Poor nutrition contributes to this and other stress factors such as sub clinical infections, heavy metals, environmental toxins all contribute as well.


Panic attacks are felt in the brain or mind and in Western Medicine are treated as such, the truth however is that these are adrenal based issues and when the adrenals fail to pump enough hormones to keep the body normalized then weird things begin to happen.   Cortisol is a hormone that every knows because they hear about in the press but this is only one of the many hormones secreted by the adrenal glands.  Cortisol gets secreted under stress and it has a wide range of responsibilities.  Dip into the adrenal pool too many times and you smoke the adrenals, smoke the adrenals and you cannot produce adequate hormones, lower hormones equals health problems.

Infomercial programs and all the self help books that try to tell you panic disorders originate in your thinking are not completely true.  Yes the mind and its perception can set off a panic attack but when your body is dysregulated then the smallest things will set it off.   We only set these things off when we perceive fear, so if you track your attacks, you will see specific things that can trigger and usually these are threatening in nature.   For instance walking in the forest would be peaceful for most people however if you had a bad experience related to the forest then you will perceive fear and that fear will trigger the HPA axis.

Magnesium is a critical element that keeps the adrenals and all organ systems healthy however is lost under high stress situations, the problem is further compounded when we do not get magnesium rich foods which is typical in our nutritionally starved diets*.   B vitamins, other minerals are lost under adrenal stress furthermore high adrenal stress equals high oxidation and high oxidation equals damage.

If you are suffering panic attacks please seek medical attention but also please seek out nutritional advice.   A proper diet with specific supplementation will help and addressing toxicity issues is another critical part of this.   In my case it was a parasitic infection that did me in, however I stopped  the panic attacks after careful supplementation  and repaired the adrenals with glandulars.  (I have an outline posted on my blog which has more details).

*the term 'diet' is misunderstood in American thinking, diet refers to types of food we consume which means nutritional quality of the food and not in the common thinking of calories.   Diets are used to lose weight by restriction of caloric intake which is an outdated and harmful technique.   The body needs nutrition (minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, quality protein, antioxidants) - nutrition fuels the metabolic rate and helps the body remove toxins that stop efficient metabolic processes.


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