I notice you say that you found the process hard-going. How many treatments did you have before you began to feel any benefit? Were you working at the start of treatment or off work? I am unable to work due to the effects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (M.E.) so unless you are also not working it will probably not be possible to make a meaningful comparison. 18 treatments is a lot! If you are willing I am interested to know what detox effects you experienced. I have been experiencing immense fatigue, pain, sleeping most of the day and night, only functional for a few hours a day. Then my mood destabilised and I found myself sliding into acute depression with attendant miseries.
 
Happily since stopping treatment (w.e.f. 12 April 2007) I improved and no lasting damage seems to have occurred as far as I can tell so far. Fatigue levels seem as before started treatment. Mood is vastly improved and stable. Not having to go through the PLX after effects has put a smile on my face and a spring in my step! I am seeing a breathing coach (Buteyko specialist http://www.buteykohealth.com/index.html). One session so far and this is proving beneficial. Doctor thought my breathing pattern may be contributing to the raised blood pressure. It is certainly true that my breathing was badly out of kilter. I am hopeful that the asthma side of things can be improved via this method/technique. A fellow CFS/M.E. sufferer I knew some years ago benefited a lot from breathing training. Not sure if it was Buteyko but he was helped.
 
According to test results etc,  I show signs of toxic exposure to chemicals and I am chemically sensitive to various substances. I grew up in highly polluted areas due to heavy industry and when I contracted Glandular Fever was living in one such environment. I was probably exposed to an intersting cocktail of industrial waste by-products. In the absence of pinning it down to anything mor specific this is my likeliest candidate.

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Answer:

While I found the going hard from the beginning of the treatment I would also say that I felt that it was helping from the first treatment.  However, I had the advantage that I had been taking oral phospholipids for a few months prior to starting the actual PLX and had seen some distinct improvements (my problems are chemical sensitivity and food intolerance to salicylates, amines and glutamates and I had found that the oral phospholipids allowed me to expand my diet) and so I was very confident that it was going to help which may have biased my view.  However, after 10+ years of being ill and trying various treatments I have a fairly good idea about what is going on with my body and so I don't think that I was fooling myself.

I had been off work for 10 months prior to starting the PLX treatment.  The side effects that I got were severe migraines, various aches and pains and extreme lethargy.  These would set in the day after the treatment, but then that is the way that things work for me as when I get an exposure I will feel the effects most the day(s) after the exposure.  I would be confined to bed for days after a PLX treatment (5 days after the first one), though from memory the length of time reduced after a while.  If memory serves me correctly I also started to get some diarrhea after a number of treatments, though this may have been a result of starting to take D-Ribose in accordance with Dr Myhill's CFS protocol which seemed to kick off its own round of detox.  Also, as time went by, even though the migraines and aches and pains were reduced, I did get increasingly run down and I think that without the boost that I got from the D-Ribose, I would have had to take the treatment much more slowly and build in some significant rest breaks.

These side effects were similar to what I was getting from any exercise that I did prior to starting the treatment and so from my point of view I didn't really have much to loose.  Note that "exercise" is possibly a too grand a word for what I mean as the only exercise that I was getting at the time was the trips that I had to make to the supermarket or to doctors' appointments.

To cope with the side effects I used to take various amino acid supplements plus vast amounts of vitamin C.  The C and cysteine were probably most useful but glycine, taurine and MSM were probably also useful.  Cysteine is the main thing that our bodies need to make glutathione (along with glycine and glutamate which you should be able to get from food if you have a reasonable diet), but the main thing is to learn to listen to your body and learn what you need to take to deal with the problems that you face.  This will take some experimentation, but I think is well worth the effort.

The depression is a real blow.  I was also taking 5-HTP (50 mg 4 times per day) at the time that I was doing the PLX and this may have been helpful in protecting me against anything like this.  As I have got better I have been able to cut this back to mostly 50 mg per day.  5-HTP is a serotonin precursor.

In my view the side effects from the treatments that I have done are an unavoidable fact of life and have accompanied each of the useful treatments that I've done (oral phospholipids, PLX, D-Ribose, colestipol, DMPS chelation and infrared).  Maybe I could have found a way to take the treatments more slowly and so reduce the level of the side effects but I'm fed up with being ill and so I see the pain as an investment that I'm prepared to make to get me back to work.  Unfortunately it seems to be all to easy to fill our bodies with toxins and all too hard to get them out.  If there is a magic bullet treatment out there then I haven't discovered it.  That said, even I would baulk at long period of depression.

If you think that it is worth trying another form of phospholipid treatment, then you could discuss using oral phospholipids with the doctors at Nutrition Associates.  I found these to be a much gentler form of the treatment, plus you can control the dosage much more.  The things that I was (and still am) taking are:

1.  Seriphos which is made by TE Neesby.  This supplies phosphatidyl serine.  I buy this from the manufacturer but to do this you need to be able to send them US dollars (e.g. use PayPal to send money to a US friend) as they don't take credit cards.  TE Neesby's address is:

  TE Neesby
  9909 North Meridian Avenue
  Fresno, CA 93720
  USA

  Telephone:  +1 559 433 3110
  Fax:  +1 559 433 3113

Alternatively, you may be able to convince Nutrition Associates to start stocking this if they now have a few patients who see benefit from the PLX but are finding the injections too hard to bear.  I told them how useful I had found it, but at that stage they weren't too interested.  I've recently mentioned it to another person who emailed about the PLX so if you both hassle them about it you may get some action.  You may also be able to find it from an internet seller that does take credit cards.

2.  Holland & Barrett Triple Strength Soya Lecithin.  I use this one rather than the other lecithin products that Holland & Barrett sell as it has a standardised amount of phosphatidyl choline in it whereas the others don't.

It would then be a matter of experimenting with the dose to see how much of each you found to be useful.

The PLX wasn't the final solution for me but I think that it improved my health sufficiently to allow me to do the treatments that I have done subsequently as we have been able to make further discoveries about what is wrong with me (colestipol, DMPS and infrared) and so I see it as a very important foundation stone in my treatment.  I have not yet been able to return to work (and when I do I will have to work from home as I still need to be able to control my exposure to the chemicals that make me ill) but I am hopeful that my return isn't too far away.  I can now go for a half hour walk or go shopping without too much ill effect and it is only the infrared treatments that really stir up the toxins.

I hope that you can find away to get back to better health.  Maybe the first step for you will be improving your breathing and that this will give you the strength to try the next thing.


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