The Cause of Fibromyalgia by Jason Uttley
http://www.earthclinic.com/CURES/fibromyalgia.html
THE CAUSE OF FIBROMYALGIA
by Jason A. Uttley
juttley@hotmail.com
“Fluoridation could turn out to be one of the top 10 mistakes of the 21st century.”
Dr. Hardy Limeback
National Research Council, 2006 Review of Fluoride Toxicity
For more than fifty years the words "chronic fatigue" have been synonymous with the first stage of a condition known as systemic fluorosis, or chronic fluoride poisoning. In fact, so well known is that particular association that motion picture director Stanley Kubrick would use it in his dark satire, Dr. Strangelove, to describe the moment his character, Gen. Jack Ripper, came to develop his fruity theories on the dangers of fluoridation.
By contrast, only a handful of the world's leading experts on fluoride toxicity have long been aware that the symptoms of the emerging condition known as "fibromyalgia" exactly match those of the most severe form of fluoride poisoning. This little known fact was quietly highlighted by the intense focus on potential Sarin gas exposure for the nearly 200,000 veterans of the first Gulf War who have quietly become the largest single group to ever develop fibromyalgia. Despite the lack of evidence of mass exposure, it remained telling that the top authorities on a nerve gas known to derive all of its toxicity from fluoride proved they could not tell the difference between the lingering effects of Sarin exposure and the symptoms of fibromyalgia.
While the majority of veterans blamed the preventative medications they’d been forced to take as the source of their illness, fearful military leaders shifted the focus away from those drugs so quickly that few seemed to notice that Sarin gas was not the only potential source of toxic fluoride exposure. Only as more and more veterans developed fibromyalgia and its related conditions in the years since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, including many who did not even leave the U.S. mainland, have those soldiers and committed researchers been able to slowly pressure the military to focus attention back on those drugs.
The VA now stands at the center of the fibromyalgia controversy, attempting to explain to the medical community…
1.
How the seemingly harmless sounding chronic fatigue syndrome relates to fibromyalgia, a condition that eventually cripples most of those who develop it with a laundry list of debilitating symptoms including: brain fog, severe muscle & joint pain, thyroid dysfunction, muscle spasms, numbness, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, hair loss, vision problems, spinal & cranial calcification & kidney dysfunction?
2.
What hundreds of thousands of largely male veterans might have in common with the estimated 8-10 million Americans, mostly women, who have now developed a crippling condition that seemed to emerge out of nowhere in the early 1980's?
When I developed my case of fibromyalgia from 2 months of Cipro, a widely popular fluorinated
Antibiotic that is normally prescribed for 7-10 days at a time, no one really knew why I'd become sick. But that changed in late 2001, when many of the key questions regarding fibromyalgia were unexpectedly answered. For as a few anthrax-laced letters made their way into the U.S. mail system, thirty thousand people were suddenly put on 2 months of that very same medication. While most had not been exposed to anthrax, the CDC encouraged that Cipro be used for an extended course as a purely precautionary measure. However, as the medical community closely monitored those individuals, they began to notice the appearance of disturbing side effects. So severe and so widespread were those side effects in fact, that many were openly encouraged to stop taking the drug and switch to a “safer” medication.
For a drug that had been prescribed over 200 million times, largely to women with urinary tract infections, the medical community was at a loss to explain why the extended treatment seemed to lead to such a widespread reaction. Things only worsened over time though. Among those who had stopped taking the medication, many began to realize that their so-called side effects were actually permanent. And even more remarkably, many months after the treatment, it was observed that everyone of those sampled that had completed the full two month treatment appeared to develop those same, permanent, crippling symptoms; symptoms that exactly match those of the emerging condition known as fibromyalgia.
Not an allergic drug reaction as it turned out, but rather a universal toxic reaction to a fluoride based compound known as fluorophenyl. The same compound found in the now infamous cholesterol-lowering drug Baycol and weight-reducing drug, Fen-Phen. While the impact of Fen-Phen on the heart muscle consumed most of the focus back in 1997, some fibromyalgia groups have since tried to bring attention to the fact that the drug also appeared to be linked to fibromyalgia and its related conditions. Such a connection was highlighted for me when I met one of the longstanding support group leaders of the Minnesota Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Fibromyalgia Assoc., who had developed her disabling case of fibromyalgia (which eventually put her in a wheelchair) after an extended treatment of Fen-Phen.
Of course, when the fluorinated drug Fen-Phen was taken off the market in Sept of 1997, very little attention was paid to the fact that the non-fluorinated version of the same drug remained on the market. Nor was much attention paid to the fact that just months before, in April of 1997, the FDA had forced toothpaste manufacturers to dramatically upgrade their warning labels after suddenly “discovering” that fluoride was severely neurotoxic. EPA scientists in Washington D.C. quickly followed the unpublicized FDA action by calling for an immediate end to the practice of adding fluoride to the water supply, writing in their official letter of opposition that, "Like most Americans, including many physicians and dentists, most of our members had thought that fluoride's only effects were beneficial - reductions in tooth decay, etc. … We are [now] compelled to consider the likelihood that humans are experiencing damage to their brains and kidneys at the 'optimal' level of 1ppm."
http://www.nteu280.org/Issues/Fluoride/NTEU280-Fluoride.htm
Already deeply concerned over studies demonstrating fluoride’s considerable power to mutate genes, EPA scientists began to move aggressively against the controversial additive they had long supported after learning that one of the most prestigious dental research centers in the U.S., the Harvard-affiliated Forsyth Institute, had recently proven that fluoride was also severely neurotoxic. As similar studies appeared to confirm those disturbing findings, investigative journalist Joel Griffiths would inform Forsyth’s noted neurotoxicologist-turned whistleblower, Phyllis J. Mullenix, that her so-called discovery was not in fact a discovery at all. For not only had the 20th century’s top experts on fluoride toxicity, Kaj Roholm & George Waldbott, long warned of fluoride’s severe central nervous system effects, but recently declassified documents revealed that the original champion of fluoridation, Harold C. Hodge, one of America’s most influential toxicologists, who in his final days guided every step of Mullenix’s research, had long ago buried evidence demonstrating the extreme neurotoxicity of fluoride himself.
The startling documents, uncovered by journalists in the wake of a 1995 presidential investigation, revealed that while supervising the injection of toxic doses of radioactive plutonium into unsuspecting hospital patients to gauge its effect on the human body (as Director of Toxicology for the Manhattan Project), Hodge had simultaneously championed the idea of dumping toxic fluoride waste into the water supply under the guise of protecting children’s teeth. Only, with millions of tons of fluoride waste generated from the enriching of uranium, Hodge's only concern had been to find a way to dispose of the massive amounts of fluoride required to make nuclear weapons. With the threat of an arms race already looming, Hodge invited the research labs of major industrial fluoride polluters to help cover up evidence of fluoride’s extreme toxicity, including its central nervous system effects, all in the interest of “national security.” On January 25, 1945, five days after the uranium diffusion plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee became fully operational, Hodge achieved his secret objective, as Grand Rapids, Michigan officially became the first city on earth to be artificially fluoridated.
In August of 2005, just months after journalist Chris Bryson’s landmark book “The Fluoride Deception” revealed new evidence of buried research by the men who had supposedly proven fluoride’s safety on behalf of the dental community, 11 EPA unions, representing more than 7000 public health toxicologists, chemists and other scientists, joined forces to call for a nationwide moratorium on fluoridation and a congressional investigation into its adverse effects. With alarm over the brain and kidney damaging effects of fluoride growing, concerned scientists have begun to observe how closely the symptoms of fibromyalgia and its related conditions appear to match the symptoms of chronic fluoride poisoning. While few paid much attention to the list of symptoms described by Dr. George Waldbott, M.D., the founder of the International Society of Fluoride Research and corresponding scientific journal “Fluoride”, when his 1978 book “Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma” was first published, those familiar with the fibromyalgia related conditions have been struck by the apparent connection.
The following unedited symptoms of chronic fluoride poisoning, authored by the leading authority on fluoride toxicity only a few years before the first mass cases of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia were reported, appear on page 393 of the book “Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma”…
Chronic fatigue not relieved by extra sleep or rest
Headaches
Dryness of the throat and excessive water consumption
Urinary tract irritation
Aches and stiffness in muscles/bones (arthritic-like pain)
In lower back In neck area
In jaws In arms, shoulders, legs
Muscular weakness
Muscle spasms (involuntary twitching)
Tingling sensations in fingers (especially) and feet
Gastrointestinal disturbances
Abdominal pains Blood in stools
Diarrhea Bloated feeling (gas)
Constipation Tenderness in stomach area
Feeling of nausea (flu-like symptoms)
Pinkish-red or bluish-red spots (like bruises, but round or oval) on
the skin that fade and clear up in 7-10 days.
Skin rash or itching, especially after showers or bathing.
Mouth sores (also from fluoridated toothpaste)
Loss of mental acuity and ability to concentrate
Depression
Excessive Nervousness
Dizziness
Tendency to lose balance
Visual disturbances
Temporary blind spots in field of vision
Diminished ability to focus (possible retinal damage)
(See Reference Image: Image is of Page 393 of George Waldbott's 1978 book "Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma", which was written in collaboration with Albert W. Burgstahler, PhD and H. Lewis McKinney, PhD. Waldbott was the founder of the International Society of Fluoride Research and the "Fluoride"
Science journal. Waldbott was regarded as one of the 20th century's top experts in fluoride toxicity.)
Thanks to medical specialization and the often-slow progression of symptoms, those who develop most of the major symptoms of chronic fluoride poisoning and are eventually diagnosed with "fibromyalgia", frequently share the experience of being treated like hypochondriacs, as one symptom after the next emerge, are diagnosed & treated separately by physicians. As a result, by the time the condition advances to include nearly the entire list of symptoms (including debilitating “brain fog”, or what Waldbott termed the “loss of mental acuity and ability to concentrate”), the fibromyalgia diagnosis has often been preceded by such labels as "chronic fatigue syndrome", "depression", "hypothyroidism", "irritable bladder", "irritable bowel syndrome", "multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome", and "myofascial pain syndrome", among others. Labels aside, whether or not those who suffer from fibromyalgia have been officially diagnosed with each of these related conditions, the overwhelming majority have symptoms of each and therefore understand from experience that they are all elements of a single underlying condition.
Although the relative newness of fibromyalgia and many of its related conditions are often debated, what is not is that medical specialists began observing their sudden widespread appearance beginning in the early 1980's. In fact, so dramatically did the number of those suffering from the most debilitating symptoms ramp up, that by the end of the decade, Frederick Wolfe and the other leading rheumatologists who had only just gathered to define “fibromyalgia” a few years earlier, abruptly went their separate ways under mounting pressure to explain its sudden emergence. While the focus of the fluoride controversy has long been centered on the water supply, the anthrax letters of 2001 demonstrated how highly toxic forms of fluoride now available in select prescription drugs may be playing a considerable role in the emerging epidemic. For if a fluorinated
Antibiotic like Cipro (in a drug class developed in the early 1980's), can universally induce what is essentially the most severe form of fluoride poisoning in just 2 months, imagine how far down the road all those women are who have consumed mere weeks of the widely popular antibiotic.
All this brings to mind the key objection of the 14 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry & Medicine, including the 2000 Nobel Laureate for Medicine, Arvid Carlsson, that have warned against the practice of dumping fluoride waste into the nation’s water supply. For even before fluoride was known to be severely neurotoxic by more than a handful of experts, some of world’s top scientists expressed grave concerns about the potential long-term damage that might result from adding the powerful enzyme poison to any substance that might be ingested, given its ability to accumulate in the human body. Ironically, not only have such warnings not been heeded, but it is precisely because of fluoride's cumulative nature that it has been increasingly added to prescription drugs. In adding an element that does not tend to leave the body, fluorinated drugs become significantly more potent than their non-fluorinated counterparts.
However, as the leading experts in fluoride toxicity have cautioned for decades, there is also a huge risk in adding even minute quantities of fluoride to each new drug. For not only do they add to the already dangerous levels of the cumulative neurotoxin in our diet, but it is entirely possible that certain prescription drugs could potentially fragment within the human body and reform hyper-toxic fluoride compounds, such as fluoro acetate. Given that there is a well-known delayed reaction between the point such forms of fluoride enter the body (or are formed in the body), and when symptoms begin, each new drug represents a potential time bomb; a truly nightmarish scenario made infinitely more likely with an FDA run by Wall Street analysts, appointed specifically to fast track drugs and allow drug companies not to have to monitor their long-term, chronic toxicity. That there was a delayed reaction in the onset of symptoms for most veterans of the first Gulf War, as well as the victims of the anthrax letters treated with Cipro, it seems increasingly likely that fibromyalgia represents just such a worst-case scenario.
Regardless of the specific form of fluoride involved though, perhaps the most compelling evidence linking fluoride to the cause of fibromyalgia may actually be reflected in the work of a few leading fibromyalgia researchers, who have unknowingly been uncovering key elements of chronic fluoride poisoning that have long been the focus of the top experts in fluoride toxicity….
1.
R. Paul St. Amand – with EPA scientists focused on the brain and kidney damaging effects of fluoride, this leading fibromyalgia researcher discovered guaifenisen as a treatment for fibromyalgia (and all its related conditions) after observing that every case appeared to be linked to a dysfunction of the kidney tubules. In treating thousands of patients, St. Amand has effectively proven what the top expert in fluoride toxicity, Kaj Roholm, suggested long ago in his definitive reference guide “Fluorine Intoxication”, which is that the kidneys lay at the root of nearly all the crippling symptoms, including the severe cognitive impairment termed “brain fog.”
2.
Michael J. Rosner – the fibromyalgia researcher who pioneered the highly controversial surgery to remove spinal and cranial calcifications (where fluoride is well known to accumulate) that frequently develop in those with advanced cases of fibromyalgia. Promoted by groups like the National Fibromyalgia Research Association, this element of fibromyalgia mirrors what is arguably the most unique element of extreme chronic fluoride poisoning, known to experts in fluoride toxicity as “skeletal fluorosis.” (See 2nd and 3rd phase changes to the osseous system on page 142 of Roholm’s “Fluorine Intoxication” for a complete description)
3.
Garth and Nancy Nicolson – renowned immunologists who began studying fibromyalgia when their daughter returned home from Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War complaining of symptoms. In developing the highly sophisticated mycoplasma test, the Nicolsons demonstrated that immune dysfunction was a key component of fibromyalgia. Discovered that male veterans afflicted with the condition appeared to spread fibromyalgia sexually to their female partners through an unusually high incidence of recurring urinary tract infections. Presumably unaware of the potential connection to fluorinated
Antibiotics , the Nicolsons went on an unsuccessful search for a potential contagious biological agent that might be able to explain the rapid rise in fibromyalgia.
Ultimately, I know from experience that those suffering from the “brain fog” associated with fibromyalgia may have great difficulty comprehending what I have written here. To those people I say, you really only need to know one thing about the connection between fluoride & fibromyalgia, and that is this: if fluoride is indeed the cause of your condition, you will see a dramatic improvement in your symptoms simply by minimizing your exposure to fluoride. In this way, you can not only prove or disprove the cause of your condition, but even potentially make yourself better at the very same time. In my case, it was only by avoiding…(a) fluorinated drugs [those with “fl” in the chemical name], (b) fluorinated vitamins & supplements [even residual exposure to fluoride from other ingredients, such as those in many multi vitamins], (c) fluoridated water [using only distilled, reverse osmosis water instead], (d) fluoride-rich foods [i.e. tea, foods with water added, etc.), and to a lesser extent, (e) fluoride-based pesticides (i.e. sulfuryl fluoride)…that I was able to reduce how fast fluoride built up in my bloodstream and induced my symptoms of "fibromyalgia."
Today, I know I owe my very life to whistle blowers like Dr. Phyllis Mullenix. While the noted neurotoxicologist only highlighted one particular element of fluoride poisoning, it was a critical one that allowed EPA scientists and others to begin to open their eyes to the growing body of independent scientific research that has slowly begun to expose “fibromyalgia”, “chronic fatigue syndrome”, and a variety of related conditions, as merely labels for the various symptoms, or stages, of chronic fluoride poisoning. Dr. Don Goldenberg, the noted rheumatologist who first introduced fibromyalgia to much of the medical community with his 1987 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), once wrote of fibromyalgia, “We should concentrate on treating the symptoms of chronic illness, not searching for a cause.” His statement mirrors the current mindset of much of the medical community, who offer to treat the myriad of debilitating symptoms related to fibromyalgia as if they are wholly unrelated to one another, as if the cause doesn’t matter. Well, I can tell you from experience, the cause certainly does matter.
*** Print Jason's article (download .pdf) ***
REFERENCE IMAGES :
Image #1: This image is an except of "The Fluoride Deception", which discusses the relative toxicity of inorganic airborne fluoride (as an example of fluoride's extreme toxicity). See the paragraph that begins, "The befuddlement of...."
Image #2: Image is of Page 393 of George Waldbott's 1978 book "Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma", which was written in collaboration with Albert W. Burgstahler, PhD and H. Lewis McKinney, PhD. Waldbott was the founder of the International Society of Fluoride Research and the "Fluoride"
Science journal. Waldbott was regarded as one of the 20th century's top experts in fluoride toxicity.
Image #3 (.pdf): The 2007 Managing Editor of the International Society of Fluoride Research's Fluoride Journal, Bruce Spittle, openly expressed concern of a potential link between fluoride and chronic fatigue syndrome as far back as 1993. In his review of the Psychopharmacology of fluoride, published in the International Clinical Psychopharmacology Journal in 1994, the concerns of the ISFR were openly revealed in final paragraph... "These symptoms are reminiscent of those seen in the chronic fatigue syndrome."
Image #4, Part 1 & Part 2 (.pdfs):
Chronic-Fatigue-Syndrome Journal article by Julia A. Laylander published in 1999 highlights the emerging scientific evidence linking Chronic Fluoride Toxicity to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia.
FLUORIDE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Learn how to test your sensitivity to fluoride and see answers to other important fluoride related questions. To submit a new question, please contact Jason at juttley@hotmail.com.
SPECIAL NOTES AND LINKS:
Interview of investigative journalist Chris Bryson (Part I) - “Fluoride
Science is corporate science. Fluoride science is DDT science. It’s asbestos science. It’s tobacco science. It’s a racket.” Learn how The Mellon Institute, on behalf of Alcoa Aluminum, helped “prove” the safety of fluoride, just as they had with asbestos, by manufacturing fraudulent science for more than half a century in an effort to stem massive litigation against industry polluters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3y8uwtxrHo
Robert J. Carton - “Fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time.” Twice elected to lead the union of EPA scientists in Washington D.C., Carton wrote the first EPA regulations for controlling asbestos discharges and was among the first scientists at EPA Headquarters to question the extreme toxicity of fluoride and its related health effects.
Sarin Gas & Fibromyalgia - In 1992, Robert J. Carton, moved from EPA Headquarters to the U.S. Army. As the Chief of Environmental Compliance for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, in Fort Detrick, Maryland, Carton was among the first to realize that the symptoms the veterans of the 1991 Gulf War were developing matched those of the most extreme form of fluoride poisoning (termed “organophosphate poisoning” by the military). In February of 1998, the EPA's fluoride expert drafted this memo, containing a list of references & recommendations that had been requested to quietly investigate the role of fluoride in the most widespread of the Gulf War illnesses, which the VA would later confirm was indeed fibromyalgia.
http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/000056.htm
Interview of neurotoxicologist Phyllis J. Mullenix (taken from Chris Bryson interview) - “When I first presented the results of these studies, one of the individuals sitting and listening to the results, he says ‘Do you have any idea what you’re saying…. You’re telling us that we’re reducing the IQ of children.’ And basically, I said, ‘Yes.’” As the woman who many believe led the first toxicology dept in the history of American dentistry, Mullenix would later learn that “the loss of mental acuity & ability to concentrate” was only one element of chronic fluoride poisoning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzCJeydMJMw
American Dental Association (ADA) Warning – In November of 2006, the American Dental Association quietly issued the following warning to parents, “If using a product that needs to be reconstituted, parents and caregivers should consider using water that has no or low levels of fluoride.” And why should infant formula suddenly be made without the so-called ‘optimal’ amount of fluoride that ADA has long advocated and which EPA scientists now link to “brain and kidney damage” you ask? In a carefully worded statement, the ADA implied that the reason had something to do with a cosmetic discoloration of the teeth (dental fluorosis) related to drinking too much fluoride, while at the same time casually referencing the National Research Council’s 2006 report on fluoride toxicity.
http://www.ada.org/prof/resources/pubs/epubs/egram/egram_061109.pdf
National Research Council’s 2006 Report on Fluoride in Drinking Water – To say that the health effect sited by the ADA in their warning was taken out of context of the National Research Council’s report would be a gross understatement. What follows is the link to the actual 507-page NRC report, which includes multiple references to the brain and kidney damaging effects of fluoride, including the research of Phyllis Mullenix.
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11571&page=R1
EPA Management handcuffs National Research Council - In 1985, EPA management pushed through a dramatic increase in the maximum allowable concentration of fluoride in the water supply against the objections of its own scientists. Following the discovery of the extreme neurotoxicity of fluoride, an element already widely known to be more acutely toxic than lead, EPA scientists joined together in an effort to warn Americans that there was serious cause for concern, particularly given fluoride's suspected link to several emerging conditions. In 2006, EPA management attempted to quiet EPA scientists, by forcing the National Research Council to identify only adverse health effects that had been "proven", and not just those that could be "reasonably anticipated." Nevertheless, the NRC report broke new ground in exposing at least some of the adverse effects of fluoride consumption.
http://www.fluorideresearch.org/393/files/FJ2006_v39_n3_p163-172.pdf
Links to more information on fluoride’s adverse health effects:
EPA Scientists, including Robert J. Carton and J. William Hirzy, the former and present leaders of the EPA union of scientists in Washington D.C., respectively, support the work of each these sites…
International Society of Fluoride Research
“Fluoride, the official quarterly journal of the International Society for Fluoride Research (ISFR), is published for the advancement of research and dissemination of knowledge pertaining to agricultural, analytical, biochemical, biological, chemical, clinical, dental, ecological, environmental, industrial, medical, metabolic, pharmacological, synergistic, and toxicological aspects of inorganic and organic fluorides or fluorine compounds.
Fluoride Journal -
http://www.fluoride-journal.com/
Advisory Board -
http://www.fluorideresearch.org/394/files/FJ2006_v39_n4_p0iv-0vi.pdf
(Available in printed form at the Biomedical Library of the University of Minnesota, as well as many other major medical libraries)
Second Look
“Provides scientifically oriented information representing all sides of the fluoridation and oral health policy related issues, from the best sources available…. Virtually all of our listings are peer-reviewed articles from mainstream medical, dental, and scientific journals worldwide, and most offer legitimate reason for concern regarding the health effects of fluoride toxicity.”
Bibliography of Scientific Literature on Fluoride -
http://www.slweb.org/bibliography.html
Advisory Board and Staff -
http://www.slweb.org/slboard_staff.html
The Fluoride Action Network
“The Fluoride Action Network is an international coalition seeking to broaden public awareness about the toxicity of fluoride compounds and the health impacts of current fluoride exposures. Along with providing comprehensive and up-to-date information on fluoride issues to citizens, scientists, and policymakers alike, FAN remains vigilant in monitoring government agency actions that may impact the public's exposure to fluoride.”
Fluoride Health Effects Database -
http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/
Advisory Board and Staff -
http://www.fluoridealert.org/about-fan.htm
Copyright © February, 2007 Jason A Uttley. Not to be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.
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