Posted by bleauberry on April 18, 2008, at 19:07:56
In reply to The Depression Delimna, posted by bulldog2 on April 18, 2008, at 15:50:00
You and I ask the same questions. It is a massive dilemma.
You can get any lab tests you want online. There are several places on the net where you can get just about any urine/blood/saliva lab test you want mailed to your home. Some are home tests, some you have to go to a nearby lab for blood draw, but you don't need a doctor. The labs that do the actual analysis are big name national labs such as Doctor's Data and Great Smokies. I have had several tests done this way and was highly impressed. Bottom line, we live in a new age where you do not need a doctor to get the tests you want. The only advantage of a doctor is that it insures coverage by health insurance. Insurance companies don't take kindly to tests not ordered by a doctor. Don't fall prey to a stubborn doctor. He is supposed to work with you and for you, not against you. Who pays who?
As you said, there could be multiple problems causing symptoms. There is probably one main problem causing all the others. For example, mercury will throw adrenals, thyroid, and intestines all out of whack. Another example, adrenal fatigue can turn heatlhy thyroid into sluggish thyroid, as it downregulates itself in a self survival mode. An unknown food intolerance can cause so much stress as to cause the adrenal fatigue. On and on.
My tests confirmed what I already suspected. But it was a rude awakening to actually see it on formal paper in charts and graphs and decimals and numbers and measurements and stuff.
I don't know of any magic bullet. Once the problems are identified, then it begins a journey of fixing the worst one first, while gently tweeking the others. Treating the main problem will often reduce or eliminate some of the others. In that regard, myself and many others are of the belief that nothing is more crucial for all healings than adrenal support.
I believe all psychiatric drugs affect adrenals and thyroids one way or the other. People stumble onto a cure with an ssri, or something, as an example, believing they had low serotonin, when all along the real thing going on was that the drug was reducing excess cortisol or stabilizing abnormal fluctuations or raising low cortisol. Go to pubmed sometime and type in a search the name of a drug and cortisol and see what you get. Do it with a bunch of drugs. You'll see what I mean. Try it with thyroid too.
However, even heavily suffering mercury toxic folks can improve dramatically when they find meds that counteract what mercury is doing, even without detoxing mercury. Might be a simple as an ssri to some complex cocktail of anti-glutamate pro-dopamine stuff, or anything inbetween. Without even treating the known problem itself, meds can help a lot. But as you and I know, finding the right meds is an educated guess...trial and error, 2 months at a time.
With or without lab tests to identify multiple depression causes, I do not know of a better methodology of treating depression than the current art of trial and error. What sets many of us back is when intolerable side effects or apparant lack of efficacy prevent us from going a full 8 to 12 weeks.
I wish I had the magic bullet you and I both want. I don't. But I can at least tell you, if you want some tests and your doctor is stubborn, get them yourself. You'll take more ownership of your destiny and cure in the process. The doctor is not the owner of your health. You are.
Tests I believe are most important, in order of importance:
24 hour 4 sample saliva cortisol...Doctors Data also includes DHEA and gluten intolerance in the same test from the same samples.
Thyroid freeT3, freeT4, TSH, total T4.
Hair sample from Doctors Data that includes all metals...including obscure things like Lithium. Other labs don't test enough metals and it makes diagnosis less reliable.
Though the results are theoretical in interpretation, sometimes helpful and sometimes not, I like a urine neurotransmitter metabolite analysis done. The other tests above are way more important. If the neuros are whacky, it's probably because of something else. Simply raising or lowering whacky neuros won't fix what's making them whacky, but should relieve symptoms to some degree.
With all of the tests above, interpretation is key. Seek help here, at Yahoo chelation forums, Yahoo adrenal/thyroid forums. Even when a doctor thinks the numbers are in the so-called "normal range" (subjective and proven faulty), you can read what the numbers are saying instead of just seeing if they lie within a normal band or not. There are quite obvious telltale patterns that most doctors are blind to, possibly from the beaurocratic FDA/pharmaceutical company mold. As my doc said, even though we can measure thyroid hormones in the blood, we cannot see how they are working or not working at the cellular receptor level. He says lab tests are responsible and usefull, but the bottom line is to treat the symptoms regardless of what the paper says and see how the patient responds.
One doc said that given any difficult patient, they all respond to 1 to 3 of 20 of the doc's favorite drugs, most of them off-label (weird things like Naltrexone, Memantine, Benadryl, Monicycline...). But trial and error was admitted as being the only way to identify which of those drugs would work for which person. And in the end when the patient was living a new life, neither the patient nor the doctor knew why the drug worked. It just did.
poster:bleauberry
thread:824066
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080412/msgs/824122.html