Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, is a board certified internist and Medical Director of the national Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers and Chronicity. He is author of the popular free iPhone application "Cures A-Z," and author of the best-selling books
Dr. Teitelbaum knows CFS/fibromyalgia as an insider — he contracted CFS when he was in medical school and had to drop out for a year to recover. In the ensuing 25 years, he has dedicated his career to finding effective treatments.
Website: www.EndFatigue.com
Diabetes is an increasingly common problem. It bears noting that in countries with non-westernized diets, diabetes is essentially unheard of—until the diet changes to high sugar and low fiber. Because of this, diabetes is largely a disease...
People often ask me, "What are the best things I can do to improve cognitive function?"
So here's how to get started.
The key point to realize is that our brain is like our body's motor.
It consumes 10 times as much energy for its size as the rest of
our body. So what we feed it determines whether it purrs like a
Ferrari, or runs in fits and starts, leaving us with "brain farts"
through the day.
So what are the key fuels that...
A recent study, Effects of music on pain in patients with fibromyalgia1, presents a novel therapy, and gives us a critical key to easing fibromyalgia pain.
In looking at physiology, pain has two key components. The first is that a signal gets generated and sent to the brain. This electrical signal is no different than the signal the brain receives for heat, softness, cold, or countless other sensations. For pain though, it is what the brain does with the signal after it...
Infertility affects one in six couples. It is even more common in fibromyalgia because of the hypothyroidism, nutritional deficiencies, and PCOS. These numbers are continuing to rise as sperm counts drop worldwide and undiagnosed thyroid problems increase—so you are not alone.
Fortunately, it is often quite reversible, and we have seen many people with infertility who have been able to conceive. Please though…don't go telling people it's Dr....
DOES IT SEEM LIKE EVERY NIGHT AT 2–4 A.M. YOUR INTERNAL ALARM CLOCK GOES OFF? THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST COMMON PROBLEMS PEOPLE WITH FIBROMYALGIA HAVE, AND IS INCREASINGLY COMMON IN THE GENERAL POPULATION AS WELL.
But what if it was optional?
Here are some of the major causes:
1. Drops in blood sugar. This is a major problem in people with adrenal fatigue. It can be especially common in people who are exhausted and "hangry"...
In addition to all the other problems they face, over 70 percent of people receiving chemotherapy or radiation therapy for their cancer suffer from severe fatigue. This fatigue is most often ignored.
But it is not enough to simply prolong life. It is important that life also be enjoyable. The good news? You don't have to choose. Those things that improve quality of life may also improve survival.
So got cancer fatigue? Here are four steps to optimize your energy....
After 20 to 30 years of smoking, research shows that people have a 50 percent higher risk of dying than non-smokers.
Now, a major new study in the British Medical Journal1 showed that people taking PPI acid blockers for two years also had a similar fifty percent higher risk of dying. Making prolonged use of acid blockers a deadly problem. Potentially as deadly as smoking for 20 to 30 years. Fortunately, it is also preventable. But this will require a...
Think about it this a moment. We are a big bag of water. Ever wonder why it doesn't just all flow down to our legs when we stand up?
The answer is, that it does. Because of this, our autonomic nervous system has to direct the blood vessels in our legs to contract and send the blood back up to our brain and muscles where it is needed. Otherwise, the effect can be similar to rapidly losing several units of blood.
When this system is not working properly, people's...
Ready to be able to get 8–9 hours of solid sleep a night? I can tell you for a fact it is possible to get eight hours of solid sleep a night. And it is amazing how much better you'll feel when you do. This article will focus on new treatments for optimizing sleep—naturally.
There is an outstanding new mix of essential oils that works well with the other treatments I've recommended for sleep in the past. It contains a combination of Ravensara (Ravensara...
Do your legs kick around a lot at night? Are your sheets and blankets scattered around a lot when you wake up? Does your spouse note they get kicked around a lot at night or that your legs jump? If so, you probably have restless legs syndrome (RLS), more accurately called periodic leg movement disorder of sleep (PLMD), and it is contributing to your fatigue and pain. Although you may be asleep through the night, your legs are running a marathon and you wake up exhausted!
Restless leg...
THE FOOD—MOOD CONNECTION PLAYS A MASSIVE ROLE IN HOW WE FEEL.
The nutritionally depleted wasteland we call the Standard American Diet is causing widespread nutritional deficiencies, along with an epidemic of anxiety and depression. The solution is simple, and it's NOT more Prozac. Instead, simply eating a diet high in fish, meat, fruits and vegetables, and low in processed foods and added sugar, can help you feel dramatically better. To make this easier,...
Are you a sugar addict? As with most addictions, by the time people ask this question, the answer is usually yes. A simple way to tell? Stay off sugar for two to four weeks, and see how you feel.
In the United States, with—18 percent of the average American diet coming from added sugar; sugar addiction is becoming the rule rather than the exception. Many people eat their weight in sugar every year. And it may be why you are tired, achy, "brain fogged,"...
Stress is a funny word. Loaded with the emotional bias of being a “bad” thing, the word stress can be quite deceiving, making it harder to handle than it needs to be. So we will offer a new way to look at it—and very effective ways to address it.
As the healing arts grows, it is important to remember that there are four key domains in healing:
TREATING CFS AND FIBROMYALGIA (CFS/FM/ME) can be very satisfying, because with proper treatment even these severely ill people usually improve, and sometimes completely recover, given the proper treatment. They are also remarkably complex, however, and it is easy for you and your practitioners to burn out if you don’t use the proper tools to simplify care.
We have discussed how to effectively treat these illnesses in previous articles, and more detail can be found in my...
Picture this common hospital scene...
You are 75 years old, and have been on a water fast for a week, being woken every 2â€"4 hours (vital sign checks and the person shrieking all night in the bed next to you), you get upset and want to leave or just get up to pee. You have an IV in, so the nurse won't let you up, so you complain—perhaps loudly. Next thing you know, you get strapped down to the bed in a...
Dementia is a devastating condition affecting upwards of 10,000,000 Americans, with—5 million having Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Dementia can be triggered by numerous causes including Alzheimer's, multi infarct dementia, and nutritional deficiencies. Treatment currently is geared towards giving the two barely helpful (but very profitable) medications, Aricept and Namenda, and beyond this; little is usually done.
Not because other treatments are not very helpful. But rather...
As we have discussed earlier, the energy crisis seen in CFS and fibromyalgia triggers malfunction in a main control center called the hypothalamus. This controls:
Autonomic function regulates...
Many of you have experienced the sticker shock filling a prescription, especially if you don't have prescription insurance. Unlike the cost of most goods and services in a free market economy, which are kept in check by competition and other free market forces, the cost of medications has been skyrocketing because of the lack of these controls. So where most goods will cost twice the wholesale cost and four times the cost of production, medications often cost 64,000 percent more than...
As he did so often in life, Prince is once again offering us the opportunity to heal a problem that desperately needs to be fixed. It is suspected that he is one of the 15,000 Americans who die each year from an overdose of prescribed narcotics. Having severe hip pain, which did not go away with hip replacement surgery, he required the narcotic Percocet for pain relief. Although it helped, it did not do so enough. He was simply one of the 33 percent of Americans who suffer...
Because of the metabolic problems occurring in fibromyalgia and CFS, two in-house studies done in our research center showed an average 32 1/2 pound weight gain in this illness. As most of you have found, trying to lose this weight before one has addressed the underlying metabolic problems can be near impossible.
A new study in the Journal of Clinical Rheumatology1 has also noted that people with fibromyalgia are more likely to weigh more. Unfortunately, the...
