Re: I think it's working!

Yes, that was me. However, I don't think his copper was as low as I had thought at that time. After having Antibiotics that messed up his gut he was very fatigued for a year and a half but after a few months we learned that he had also had mono, so we thought at first that the fatigue was just from the mono. But then he started having food reactions when he never did before, so I knew that he had a leaky gut due to the Antibiotics .

So I thought it was candida and we were trying all kinds of candida cures (including iodide, but too low of a dose, I realize now) and also we were rotating high protein foods to try to stop the food reactions (besides eliminating the obvious ones) but with little success as far as the fatigue was concerned. After a year and a half we started him on 5 mg of methylfolate (learned he has a MTHFR mutation) and he started feeling better right away, but not quite normal. Then he had been on the GAPS diet and he started doing so well he was almost normal and I took him off GAPS but he started getting worse after a month off GAPS so I put him back on and he became very depressed after about 24 hours, which I thought was die off, but now I think it was because he was getting so much protein (for making histamine) and because the bacteria had moved higher up in his intestine and his histamine levels were fluctuating between night and day, making it difficult for his body to regulate his neurotransmitters. (I explain this on my blog, It would take too long here.)

During the next few months I realized that large doses of vitamin C to tolerance would make him feel quite a bit better. I realize now that this is because vitamin C can degrade histamine, but you have to take so much that it isn't practical. So I was giving him about 50-60 grams of C a day just so he could function.

After 7 month of this I discovered that it was histamine that was causing the symptoms, but even supporting the methylation pathways and the DAO enzyme (this was when I thought it was copper deficiency, because at first the copper helped) it wasn't helping and then I learned that when histamine (and the other neurotransmitters) are degraded, it produces an acetaldehyde that causes a negative feedback loop if it builds up and inhibits the enzyme that makes the acetaldehyde. This means that in order to get rid of large amounts of histamine you have to take supplements to get rid of acetaldehyde. (And if you have a lot of acetaldehyde from histamine or candida, then if you don't get rid of the excess acetaldehyde you will have trouble getting rid of dopamine - critical for someone with schizophrenia)

So supplementing to get rid of acetaldehyde helped quite a bit but it didn't make him normal because of the fluctuations because the body regulates the production of dopamine over a period of days, not minutes like a lot of other enzymes. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense but I explain it better on my blog.

It's evident that the Iodide is decreasing the amount of histamine that is being produced, but his body will adjust his dopamine down again because of the fluctuations unless he gets rid of all the excess histamine, so we will see if he keeps feeling better. It might take a while to get the bacteria levels down far enough for him to keep feeling good.

And oh, I know it's confusing, but my name is Kim.
Elizabeth is my middle name. Tweet