Stephen Jon Gislason MD
For many years I have been seeing patients
who complained of being sick-all-over. They often apologized for having so
many symptoms and were grateful when I did not reject them outright as
"hypochondriacs". The majority of these patients improved
with diet revision and remained in better health as long as they stayed with
a safe or core diet. I developed a standard method of diet revision called
the Alpha Nutrition Program that anyone who is sick-all-over can follow and
restore more normal functioning.
Most patients had chronic illness with
features of a recurrent flu-like syndrome. They often had digestive
complaints and most over the years accumulated health problems with
diagnoses such as migraine, fibromyalgia, depression, chronic rhinitis or
sinusitis, asthma, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and arthralgias or joint
pains. Their illnesses evolved over time.
Often there was a "background noise" of milder but chronic symptoms, punctuated
episodically by more acute and dramatic events. Most
complained of fatigue, irritability, digestive disturbances, reduced exertional tolerance, sleep disturbances, flushing, sweating,
swelling and cognitive dysfunction.
Some recalled a lifetime of symptoms that began with colic,
rhinitis, recurrent otitis media and/or eczema in infancy and progressed through different
symptom patterns as the years went by. symantec support phone number
A typical adult patient will
present with recurrent nose congestion, sore throats, abdominal pain and bloating,
aching and stiffness, fatigue, weakness and, often, cognitive
dysfunction. In any given patient, the mechanism of disease may not be demonstrable by
objective means especially when the disease is at an early stage of development and
dysfunction is relatively mild. Physical signs include flushing, allergic shiners with
suborbital edema, butterfly rash, rhinitis, enlarged cervical nodes, edema of hands and feet, muscle and connective tissue tenderness with
"trigger points", skin rashes, tender rib-sternum junctions, and spot
tenderness in the abdomen.
Often the impression is that recurring flu or colds are responsible for the illness and
antibiotics are often prescribed in the vain hope that some mysterious bacterial process
underlies the chronic or recurrent symptoms. Antibiotics may complicate the illness.
Antidepressants are the next most common drugs prescribed for these patients usually with
little or no benefit. Many patients believe that their immune system is failing because
they (and often their physicians) believe that they are getting recurrent infections.
They often seek potions to "boost their immune system", not realizing that
increased and not decreased immune activity is probably responsible for their symptoms.
Mental, emotional and behavioral disturbances are meshed with headaches, runny noses,
belly aches, joint pains and many other physical disturbances. The most common complaint is irritability. As body processes
begin to go wrong, the first feelings are annoyance with trivial matters; as the
dysfunction increase, the patient reports difficulty coping with ordinary tasks, then a
sense of things closing in, then anger. Sometimes, the first strong signal that a food
reaction is occurring is a sudden and unexpected angry outburst.
Children with food allergy may have nightmares,
tantrums, and fail to learn at school because of attention deficits. Some of these
children grow into troubled adults with "learning disability". Others remain
hyperactive, moody, and volatile. Delayed pattern food allergy patients are often
described as "depressed" or "neurotic". Migraine sufferers may have
neurological symptoms that suggest a stroke or a seizure and become moody and irritable.
Makes More Sense After You Get Better
This symptom complex didn't make much sense without a standard method of
diet revision to reveal the food origin of the disease. The basic idea is demonstrate clearing of symptoms
using a food holiday or a very simple safe set of foods. A food
holiday is the most important initial experiment since the sick patient stops eating the
foods that are making him or her ill, the illness subsides and
symptoms clear. About 15 years ago I began to recommend an elemental nutrient
formula (ENF), free of protein and peptide antigens to replace food on a
food holiday and the results were often dramatic. 10 days became the
standard food holiday because most symptoms improved within 10 days, although
for the sickest patients, up to 20 days was sometimes required before the symptoms
cleared. Some times, the improvement was obvious in a few days, but we
recognized that most patients felt worse for a few days before they started
to improve.
Many of the ever-enlarging pool of patients who are not well but who do not have the
markers of specific disease can be included in the sick-all-over syndrome. Patients with in-between disease have some of the
symptoms and signs that suggest the diagnosis of specific disease but not everything fits
together. Most chronic diseases take many years to evolve so that many in-between patients
are on their way to the final disease product. The concept of delayed patterns of immune response ("food allergy") to food
materials provides both a theoretic and practical basis for interpreting symptoms of
patients who were sick all over.
Development over
Time
Although physicians like to be presented with an acute illness, apparently of
limited duration, and like to begin their histories with the statement that "the
patient was well until 2 weeks ago when she..." - closer scrutiny of the histories of
many if not most patients reveals an evolution of symptoms over years. Patients often discount or fail
to report long-term, chronic or recurrent symptoms. They often believe they will be
considered hypochondriacs if they tell it all. Many years may be spent in an adapted
dysfunctional state (ADS) with stable symptoms or smooth adaptation to a slowly decreasing
level of function and/or a slowly increasing disability. Symptoms of a mild ADS are often
intermittent and ambiguous. A new factor such as move to a new home, a change in eating
habits, a viral infection, an injury, childbirth, or a drug reaction may precipitate
sudden "avalanche" with collapse into a more disabling illness.
The Intensity of Sick All Over Syndrome
Patients with non-specific hypersensitivity illness of moderate
intensity tend to become disabled without objective signs of their disease. Often the
laboratory investigations reveal nothing, even when symptoms are moderately severe. These
patients are most often constrained by three symptom patterns - fatigue, cognitive
dysfunction and chronic pain. As the illness intensifies, patients tend to shop around for
help and will "try anything" that might help. Physicians often treat this
presentation as "depression" and prescribe antidepressant drugs.
Some of the patients with mild to moderate hypersensitivity disease have collected
together in various support and lobby groups. The syndrome is called by different names
and the support groups have quickly developed ideologies which provide an identity and a
political presence for the sicker patients. The main groups are chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), myalgic encephalomyelitis,
fibromyalgia, and similar patients can be found in candida groups. The central feature of
CFS is chronic and disabling fatigue with reduced exertional tolerance. The fatigue was
typically associated with cognitive dysfunction and patients were often disabled by the
combination. The CFS lobby has been the most effective in getting first media and now
scientific attention.
Viral theories of the disease are most popular, and for a while, many physicians were
diagnosing chronic Ebstein Barr Virus infection, based on finding serum antibodies to the
virus. These syndromes overlap with the diagnosis of depression and, since depression has
never been a clearly defined entity, more confusion and potential conflict has arisen
between physicians who diagnose "depression" and patients who are convinced that
they are ill, not depressed. Researchers pursuing the nature and cause of CFS and several
support groups assume that the viral theory is correct. The CFIDS journal even advised CFS
patients to take precautions against spreading the virus. But a careful study of 147
individuals with CFS failed to show any correlation with viral infection The same study
did support the hypersensitivity concept. A variety of immune cell and immunoglobulin
abnormalities show up in the food allergy complex, but none to date have proven consistent
markers of the disease. As expected, a review of immunological testing in patients with
chronic fatigue shows scattered abnormalities.
Food and environmental hypersensitivity, presenting as chronic fatigue or related
syndromes, is a complex illness which takes months or years to resolve. I see patients who
have lost tolerance to many foods and only feel well if they live on a minimal diet,
supplemented with an elemental nutrient formula for several months. They also report
intolerance to chemicals in their environment, and often need special protection.
The History of
"Allergic Toxemia"
A.J. Rowe, T.G. Randolph, and Fredrick Speer were
among the first American allergists to associate chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and
recurrent flu-like patterns of illness with food and inhalant allergies. Rowe described
"allergic toxemia" in 1930 with the symptoms of drowsiness, mental confusion,
lack of initiative and ambition, irritability, fatigue, aching, and a feeling of being
poisoned. Rowe developed a system of elimination and rotation diets to treat
"allergic toxemia" and reported that a wide spectrum of mental-emotional and
physical symptoms could be relieved by diet revision. Dr. Theron Randolph and Dr. Fredrick Speer also associated a similar symptom complex
with food and inhalant allergies.
Dr. Speer referred to the
"allergic-tension-fatigue" syndrome and described "motor fatigue". A
number of popular books have followed and advanced the idea of diet revision to solve
these non-specific illness problems. The idea in all this literature was that the immune
mechanisms responsible for broad clinical spectrum went beyond the mechanism revealed by
skin tests and that diagnosis and treatment of food allergy involved empirical diet
revision. Several diet revision ideas were advocated; most began with an attempt to show
that the patient would improve by eliminating higher risk foods for several days to weeks.
Opinions varied about which foods were the best tolerated although milk, wheat, eggs, are
always included in the higher risk food category; rice and cooked vegetables in the lower
risk category.
How to Use the Alpha Nutrition
Program
Self -Help: If you are sick all over, you owe
it to yourself to try diet revision - completely and thoroughly. The Alpha
Nutrition Program is explained in enough detail in the Alpha Nutrition Manual that an intelligent, well-motivated person can follow the steps outlined. Diet
revision is an experiment, not a guaranteed cure. The hypothesis is that
your "normal" diet is causing or contributing to the disease. The
experiment is to take a food holiday or completely change your normal diet
to find out if you improve.
The good news is that you may benefit
greatly by the effort you make. Even if you succeed, you will have to be careful to stay improved. We want to be encouraging and optimistic, but at the same
time, we want you to be realistic. changing you diet can be very tricky. You have to take the diet
revision program seriously and
accept that the rules of the game are strict and may not seem fair. You cannot follow the rules 5 days a
week and do what you like for the other two days.
We recommend the slow track for all serious and chronic disorders. This means that you
should consider doing a food holiday for at least 10 days and follow the rules in Phase 1 of
the Alpha Nutrition Program exactly. You are trying to establish improvement quickly - at least within the
first two weeks. You should not expect complete remission of symptoms but you should be
convinced that there is important improvement. You will need to be in total control of your food intake.
You should start your recovery project with a period of preparation. You have to study the
manual that explains in detail how you change your diet. You may want to purchase and try Alpha
ENF and discuss the changes you plan to make with family
and friends. We recommend 2 to 3 weeks of preparation and rehearsal. Study
Section 1 of the manual carefully and pay particular attention to Chapters 2 and 7 - these
deal with the psychological aspects of change and the strategy you will need to adopt.
Consider ordering the Alpha
Nutrition Starter Pack - you will receive the program manual and a 500
Gram bottle of Alpha ENF, try it, get used to the formula and then decide if
and when you are ready for a food holiday. You can order the starter pack
with an email support option so that you can correspond with a tutor for 2-3 weeks
and have help getting started.
Alpha
Nutrition Health Education