DR. JOHN: PART II PREVENTING DEVASTATING MS, GBS AND EBS SYNDROME
A few days ago I mentioned a possible early prevention for GBS, MS and EBS dangerous and potentially fatal syndromes.
Where I suggested a broad preventive of ensuring you monitor your water and salt as well as electrolytes when exerting yourself especially if you become overheated, it is not the final solution.
It may be the best we ever come up with, but it should work. It is simple hydrate and take modest amounts of salt when getting overheated, not doing so may well be the trigger to these terrible syndromes.
I am still doing research on the internal processes of the body to determine exactly what is happening, but thought you might like to see just one avenue where problems can arise.
Below is a description of how the body uses extracellular body fluids to mitigate external fluid lost through sweet (or other methods of losing body fluids). Extracellular fluids have a higher sodium level than intracellular fluids which keeps them out of cell boundaries. Only intracellular fluids reside within cells. If the sodium level in extracellular fluids drop they can cross the cellular wall through osmosis raising the internal cell pressure of the cell resulting in rupture and death. This could be a nerve cell or the myelin sheathing insulting the nerve. Both can cause the type of damage we are discussing.
When I overheated and dehydrated; I was using specific muscles repeatedly and those are the muscles I lost when I acquired the Gillian Barre Syndrome. The muscles used heaviest were the hardest hit. Sadly, I was using plenty of muscle power. It impacted my arms and then from the navel down including organs. It did not hit at full magnitude initially, but in over 2 weeks I knew this was something big not just aches from overwork.
There are many possibilities due to dehydration that need to be considered related to electrolytes, hormones and vitamins as well as Red blood cells and blood pressure. Each could be a primary contributor or it may be a chain reaction of several. But it appears a drop in extracellular fluids and salt do to dehydration may be the trigger!
Further the time delay between the initial damage and a visit to the doctor when it gets bad enough could be and typically is weeks.
Remember, I initially assumed the original symptoms were just being overworked. This means the internal balance of the body may have returned and there are no telltale markers that justify a trigger of the event.
Lab work needs to happen within hours of the dehydration if at max days when the damage is happening. But no one is alerting people to these condition and the need for immediate reporting. There is nothing that can stop the progression or cure it once it sets in. You are impacted by a few days damage that can take a year or more to resolve. Just like being in a car wreck and receiving massive damage to the body; it takes time to heal.
This is why it is so difficult to pinpoint the exact cause.
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"Hydrostatic pressure is especially important in governing the movement of water in the nephrons of the kidneys to ensure proper filtering of the blood to form urine. As hydrostatic pressure in the kidneys increases, the amount of water leaving the capillaries also increases, and more urine filtrate is formed. If hydrostatic pressure in the kidneys drops too low, as can happen in dehydration, the functions of the kidneys will be impaired, and less nitrogenous wastes will be removed from the bloodstream. Extreme dehydration can result in kidney failure.
Fluid also moves between compartments along an osmotic gradient. Recall that an osmotic gradient is produced by the difference in concentration of all solutes on either side of a semi-permeable membrane. The magnitude of the osmotic gradient is proportional to the difference in the concentration of solutes on one side of the cell membrane to that on the other side. Water will move by osmosis from the side where its concentration is high (and the concentration of solute is low) to the side of the membrane where its concentration is low (and the concentration of solute is high). In the body, water moves by osmosis from plasma to the IF (and the reverse) and from the IF to the ICF (and the reverse). In the body, water moves constantly into and out of fluid compartments as conditions change in different parts of the body.
For example, if you are sweating, you will lose water through your skin. Sweating depletes your tissues of water and increases the solute concentration in those tissues. As this happens, water diffuses from your blood into sweat glands and surrounding skin tissues that have become dehydrated because of the osmotic gradient".
When they reference skin tissue, what they really mean is all tissue in the region of the skin (epidermis) which includes nerve cells just below the skin and above the collagen and nerves related to movement of muscles just below the collagen. All extra cellular fluids are affected starting with those closest to elevated skin temperature. As fluid is drawn from Red blood cells they become less efficient providing less oxygen to the body and risk damaged through dehydration and death. Dr. John
"Additionally, as water leaves the blood, it is replaced by the water in other tissues throughout your body that are not dehydrated. If this continues, dehydration spreads throughout the body".
When a dehydrated person drinks water and dehydrates, the water is redistributed by the same gradient, but in the opposite direction, replenishing water in all of the tissues".
This replacement is not instantaneous, sometimes gulping down large quantities of water at one time is dumped to the kidneys by passing immediate needs.
In the original post I mentioned Acidophilus as a product that can help, but may not have clarified that it helps restore the bodies balance and reduces diarrhea. Black berries (8) will stop diarrhea in 40 minutes. This is mentioned because it is one more way of losing fluids when you are dehydrated from being overheated.
I meant to mention Alpha Lipoic Acid which is the product used by body builders to reduce pain from lactic Acid build up in muscles due to over exercise. When nerves start to recover you will have muscles in atrophy. This means you will have to rebuild those muscles to regain normal function. Your muscles will have the strength of a baby.
At 210 pounds and a body builder I was strong and the muscles impacted were gone. I still have my upper body strength, but the left leg the one damaged most is just getting back to normal, no bulk or definition and where it works for every day use it is weak. You just have to dig in and do the therapy if you are going to get better. I am now at one year since the "event" and may have another 6 months to reach full recover.
We can only get better from here, if we put the effort in.
Dr. John
