[Counterpoints]

Hi,

Good work with the website.  Please add a link to the survey: http://pois.olympe-network.com

With Waldinger's paper, instead of giving it to anyone, I thought we'd create an incentive to join the forum here. So we're asking to first register at NSF (you need to in order to send/receive PM's), then send PM with regular email and PDF is returned.

Do you want to do that with the survey?

I think the survey should be accessible to anyone (I don't want to risk losing any important info), although it might be useful to add a link in the survey to the forum, once the user has completed it.

[girlwind]

 
OH POIS, OH POIS, OH POIS      []

I have just recently checked out an excellent website and forum called The DEFINITIVE MIND. It was created by a
doctor/psychiatrist named Dr. Mariano, who is extremely knowledgeable about hormone balancing and nutrition.
What a rare and amazing thing! Especially for someone trained as a psychiatrist! I am totally pleasantly shocked. 

I'd heard about this doctor before, from an ex-POIS forum member who has healed himself of POIS, but I never really
investigated it any further until now. As I recall, I've also heard Demo criticize this doctor, and dismiss him with one
fell swoop, and now I really wonder what he was thinking!

Any doctor who knows hormones and nutrition as well as this one does, and volunteers his time to answer questions of
forum members FOR FREE is not someone that you want to write off without a second thought! There is really good info
on that site, especially regarding hormone balancing. I hope you all check it out for yourselves and see what I mean.   

The links for the home page, followed by the forum are posted below. All the best to all of you in your healing quests. 


http://www.definitivemind.com/
http://www.definitivemind.com/forums/index.php

[demografx]

I have just recently checked out an excellent website and forum called The DEFINITIVE MIND. It was created by a doctor/psychiatrist named Dr. Mariano...

Girlwind, I respect your knowledge about alternative
therapies, but I - and many other people - have serious reservations about Dr. Mariano and his controversial theories, which I have posted here.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I strongly encourage anyone to follow up with careful investigation before following any of his recommendations.

I don't wish to take any further time debating this.

Best wishes back to you, girlwind, in your healing quest!

[girlwind]

I think that everyone has the right to chose for themselves what type of healing they want to pursue.
I am merely providing what I consider to be among the best information that I've found on the internet
regarding hormonal balancing--for your further investigation. It's up to you what you do with it.

[demografx]

I agree, girlwind. Many thanks!

[demografx]

The Placebo Effect

At least one person here said they don't really believe in "the placebo effect".

Here's a very interesting (and very short) video about it on WebMD:
http://www.webmd.com/video/placebo-power

[Danny_Boy]

B_Jim

I have to warn you about that I am experiencing some side effects. Recently, my teeth started being sensitive and the sensitivity goes up, when I increase my dosage. Copper has something to do with calcium, so maybe in the next days, I will stop anti-Cu things and hit calcium and see whether it gets back to normal or whether my teeth are caused by something else.

As far as I know, you would need to eat a ton of garlic to get the benefit of 1g MSM, which is one capsule. If you decide to try MSM, don´t take it with Mo, since they antagonize each other.

Good luck,
D.

[demografx]

Hi,

Good work with the website.  Please add a link to the survey: http://pois.olympe-network.com

I think the survey should be accessible to anyone (I don't want to risk losing any important info), although it might be useful to add a link in the survey to the forum, once the user has completed it.

OK, CP, it's in the works!

(I assume that you will take care of the survey link to the Forum. Please use the tiny url. It looks much better than the long, convoluted one). Thanks.

[Pronobis]

I forgot to tell you about my blood test (made some hours after 2 orgasms). So according to reference values all hormones are normal, but my testosterone level is high . Do you think that's normal?
I read that decreasing level of testosterone results with a stress, the latter is the cause of some skin problems (as I have). If I have high testosterone level what could it be?  [] [] []

Pronobis, I think that your physician is best equipped to answer this question, coupled with the rest of your medical history.

The link below might be a starting point for you, based on some searching for "high testosterone level in men", which is a fairly high-request search on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=high+testosterone+level+in+men&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Thanks Demo,
I just wanted to know if it's same with you (or some of you). I don't think that my endoc is well informed about pois )))

[Pronobis]

Is it possible to build this site in different languages?

[mat780]

Dear Pronobis,

Of course it's possible. But bear in mind that, to do that, we need people with knowledge in languages as well as science and medicine. If you can translate it to any other language, your help will be much welcomed!  []

I already offered myself to do the Spanish translation... but I think it will be on a second stage. Lets finish first with the first part of the English website, then we will add more options.

Is it possible to build this site in different languages?

[demografx]

Thanks Demo,

I just wanted to know if it's same with you (or some of you).

I don't think that my endoc is well informed about pois )))

Pronobis, at this point in POIS history, it's not realistic to expect that an endo or other health practitioner will be "well informed about POIS". Unfortunately, it's up to us to educate endo's and other physicians and healthcare workers about POIS! We can't expect them to know much; just the opposite, sometimes they will simply dismiss us and send us to psychiatrists! We need to explain POIS, the Forum, Dr Waldinger's study, show them the website and the Compendium, etc.

It's not easy, but it is most certainly achievable!

[demografx]

I think the translation will be more like a "copy" and "paste" thing.  Getting this forum professionally translated would cost over our heads.  Good luck to anyone who wants to try.

This is unnecessarily pessimistic! We have friends right here who will help out, including Mat in Spanish. B_Jim, Pronobis, and Martin know French, etc. and many people who have simply expressed a desire to help us. Known as friends of friends.

[mellivora]

Hi,
I've completed the survey questions offline and just tried to paste in my answers to the online form. However I was then greeted with a message in french apparently detailing an interuption to the service (the survey form was working the day after I last posted that it wasn't working. The new message is different to the last one I got). Again I'll try again later.

Because I can't always get online and have a lot of catching up to do, I've saved and converted the entire contents of the forum to a pdf document and also to a word document (up to and including page 218). Even in small font size the pdf is 1056 pages long! If anyone else feels it would be useful to have a copy of the forum contents in this format (the Word format document is the most useful I think), please send me a private message with an email address I can use. The pdf is 4.9 megabytes and the Word document is 26Mb! These are too large to send via normal email so I'd have to use a service such as yousendit.com or transferbigfiles.com. Perhaps in future on the website we could have a word or pdf  version of the naked scientists forum that is downloadable. Any downloadable copy would have to be updated periodically to keep up with new content being added to the NS forum.

[mat780]

Hi,
I've completed the survey questions offline and just tried to paste in my answers to the online form. However I was then greeted with a message in french apparently detailing an interuption to the service (the survey form was working the day after I last posted that it wasn't working. The new message is different to the last one I got). Again I'll try again later.

Because I can't always get online and have a lot of catching up to do, I've saved and converted the entire contents of the forum to a pdf document and also to a word document (up to and including page 218). Even in small font size the pdf is 1056 pages long! If anyone else feels it would be useful to have a copy of the forum contents in this format (the Word format document is the most useful I think), please send me a private message with an email address I can use. The pdf is 4.9 megabytes and the Word document is 26Mb! These are too large to send via normal email so I'd have to use a service such as yousendit.com or transferbigfiles.com. Perhaps in future on the website we could have a word or pdf  version of the naked scientists forum that is downloadable. Any downloadable copy would have to be updated periodically to keep up with new content being added to the NS forum.

Dear Mellivora,

Good idea!
This could be some kind of backup. We should see how we implement it, one possibility could be to separate the content in semesters (e.g. 2007_1, 2007_2, 2008_1, 2008_2, etc) this way files won’t be so big. And we could update just the last part.

[demografx]

B_Jim, the herb Shilajit sounds interesting.

There was a Romanian news story about this I found in Google News, but when I tried to translate it, I received an antiphihishing warning about it,  so I stopped.

[mellivora]

Slowly catching up with some previous posts... Demo I see you were asking for a show of hands for who would take part in a research study. I'd definitely be willing to do that, so count me in. Thanks.

[mellivora]

The website is coming together nicely - well done Mat and everyone else involved.
Pyropeach the compendium looks excellent - well done and thanks!
I understand that both of the above are still evolving so I'll read through more thoroughly and chip in ideas that I have.
Great stuff.

[El Stonio]

Hello All,
It's been a while since I've been here.  In the past I've had some moderate success with going to a mostly vegan diet etc.  Buy recently I had a sleep study done and found I had sleep apnea.  Last week I started wearing a TAP, an oral appliance that prevents your tongue from closing off air to your lungs.  Guess what?  My symptoms of POIS are gone, no exaggerating.  (I've been testing, haha.  I had sex Friday and Saturday nite and this Sunday morning jogged/hiked 10 miles.)  In the past I'd be flat on my back craving carbs, feeling depressed and sick.  This may not be everybody's solution but I urge anyone who hasnt had a sleep study to DO IT!  I tried the CPAP but that was so intrusive I laughed it off.  The TAP is aggreeable with me.  Good luck everyone.  Keep searching. Your bodies if they get the right stuff, will work correctly.  I just may get to start dating again  [] 
El Stonio

[martin88]

Dear martin88,

I urge you to find some real information on hormones (preferably at http://forums.realthyroidhelp.com/viewforum.php?f=5). If your doctor tells you, that you are fine because you´re "in the norm" and you trust him/her, you are making a mistake. There is a difference between normal and healthy ranges. Let me tell you, how "normal" is being constructed. You take, say, 150 people, take their blood, measure their hormones and design the range so that X% of those 150 people lie in that range. Obviously, this works fine, when the those sample people are healthy. When they are not and their hormonal levels are out of whack, you get a much wider range than you would get with healthy people. This is how it can happen, that 25 years ago a man was considered infertile when he had less than 100M spermia per ml of juice. Today, since the fertility rates are going down and the above described method is flawed, anybody having more  than 25M spermia per ml of juice is considered FERTILE! People suffering from thyroid disease are often told, that a TSH of, say, 2 is good, since the normal range is 0.XX - 4 (roughly). However, thyroid sufferers only feel good, when their TSH gets under 1.5 or so! When TSH is larger than that, they feel miserable independently on the type or quantity of medication. So, to sum this long article up..all of your testo is LOW! I didn´t see your thyroid labs, but FT4 should be in the upper third/quarter of the range to be healthy, TSH should be as low as possible (anything under 1 is superb). If you are from US, you are a lucky guy:) Contact Dr. John Crisler (http://www.allthingsmale.com/index.htm). He knows the difference between normal and healthy and has helped many men fighting testosterone deficiency.

For informational completeness´ sake, I should add my personal experience with dieting. Low sugar, high protein, high fat diet is what keeps me going and strong. When I eat high carbo, not to mention vegetarian, diet, I get weak, tired, sleepy and depressed. Maybe, it all has something to do with high insulin (again don´t confuse normal and healthy), which is driven down by aerobic excercise that helps many folks here, including me.

I have read some discussions here on B vitamins. If you have homocystein above 6, you are probably low on B6 and or B12 and or folic acid. When it comes to good mood, which many people are fighting here to get, nothing helped me more, than the metabolized form of B6, namely P5P. A three month supply from Swanson´s costs $5. This is making me a very positive, funny and social type of person. Got me rid of depression in a week, when nothing helped (L-Thryptophan, 5-HTP..you name it).

I was wondering, what might have predetermined me to suffer from POIS and I would like to ask you guys, when you were babies, were you breastfed? I was prematurely born and I didn´t receive a single breast-feeding my entire life. BF makes the immune system strong (catching un on Coreman´s success with Alpha 20C for immunity), so maybe it is somehow involved in our problem. To test whether immunity has any effect on POIS, I will try two immune support products (EPICOR and Immunity essentials from Swanson´s) soon and report back with results.

All of you take care,
D.

Danny, thanks for all your suggestions. I was only reporting what my doc said, I have no opinion made yet on my tests results. I'll check this. It's very possible that it's because I'm not taking enough iodine (because it's too aphrodisiac for me and cause a more severe POIS, I feel that all the energy given by this is wasted in orgasm.) So I'll now take the right amount of iodine and I'll see. I think it's a big decision to start hormonal therapy with thyroid, specially in my case. About ranges, they should take only healthy people or it doesn't make sense.. If you take a lot of b6, in a book I have it's said that b6 should always be taken with the same amount of b2 (called the energy vitamin)..don't know if it's true.
I don't know if I was breastfed for enough time but I was.