Endotoxin (LPS) Can Trigger Social Withdrawal / Isolation

haidut

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If you talk to a doctor about endotoxin (LPS), he/she will most likely give you a blank stare as this topic is very rarely covered in medical schools and the little coverage it gets simply states that endotoxin is never an issue in most people as the liver will quickly deactivate it. Yet, what is missing from this bare-bones discussions is the fact that at least 25% of US adults have NAFLD and when you add to this number the other forms of liver diseases such as NASH, cirrhosis, hepatitis, it quickly becomes obvious that more than half of adults have some form of liver dysfunction. This means that it is not at all clear that endotoxin will be quickly deactivated in such people. In addition, chronic endotoxin exposure itself is known to trigger liver disease and fibrosis, so the exposure to endotoxin seems anything but benign for most people.

The study below adds more counter-evidence in regards to the purported benign nature of endotoxin. It demonstrates that injecting bats with an amount of endotoxin that is tiny by comparison to what people get exposed to on a daily basis was enough to trigger the "sick child" syndrome and accompanying social withdrawal behavior. Social withdrawal is also the hallmark of many chronic conditions, and especially mental health disorders. So, it is quite possible that psychiatry (and other medical specialties) may have been barking up the wrong tree when it comes to treatments. Namely, medicine has been treating the symptom (social withdrawal) instead of the cause (endotoxin overload) by administering powerful psychotropic drugs many of which are provably ineffective and often quite detrimental (e.g. SSRI). If nothing else, it demonstrates that even tiny amounts of endotoxin are nothing to scoff at and needs to be taken much more seriously by mainstream medicine.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0272
https://nypost.com/2020/07/22/bats-are-better-at-social-distancing-than-people-while-sick-study/
"...To determine whether the bloodsuckers practice social distancing, the researchers injected 18 female bats with lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a chemical that triggers an immune response without the adverse effects of an infection. Later they performed a control study in which the same bats were only injected with saline. In both experiments, they removed the flying rodents from the larger group — but still within earshot — and then documented the frequency of their calls. They found that the LPS caused “female vampire bats to produce 30% fewer contact calls, with 15 of 18 bats producing fewer contact calls” during the sickness simulation compared to the control study. Unfortunately, the bloodthirsty critters don’t self-isolate as a disease-prevention policy. Rather, the researchers concluded that they just feel too ill to interact — like a sick kid taking a rain check on a playdate."
 

Rodion

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Georgi...thanks for posting this. This sounds like my life. any useful endotoxin tests that you know of?...looking around it seems like gobblygook, with no real useful test.
Thanks.
 
T

TheBeard

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You look very energetic and healthy in your Danny Roddy interviews. Are you on a long term / low dose of pharmaceutical antibiotics?
If so, which ones?
 

RisingSun

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Indeed, would be interesting to know whether @haidut follows such antibiotic protocole as his attitude doesn't point towards social isolation at all.
 

orewashin

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It's common sense, which is lacking in medicine these days. Doctors told me I was depressed for years, and it turns out I have CFS. I think they should be responsible for misdiagnosis. Then maybe they'd not tell sick patients that they're depressed.
 
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TheBeard

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It's common sense, which is lacking in medicine these days. Doctors told me I was depressed for years, and it turns out I have CFS. I think they should be responsible for misdiagnosis. Then maybe they'd not tell sick patients that they're depressed.

CFS is just as blurry a diagnosis as depression and litterally means nothing.
At least a hundred different conditions can lead to CFS :
SIBO
IBS
Fibromyalgia
Liver cholestasis
Two vertebrae that are pinching a nerve
...
 

orewashin

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CFS is just as blurry a diagnosis as depression and litterally means nothing.
At least a hundred different conditions can lead to CFS :
SIBO
IBS
Fibromyalgia
Liver cholestasis
Two vertebrae that are pinching a nerve
...
My point is that I suffer from a physical ailment, rather than a psychological one. The system is poor at recognizing CFS and medical and school systems insisted that I have mental health issues for over a decade. I was just a stupid kid, I didn't know a normal level of fatigue was. Now it's too late to do in-depth testing and hopefully it's something I can treat, rather than something like a pinched nerve.

Childhood CFS is now getting more attention.

Children's experiences of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME): a systematic review and meta-ethnography of qualitative studies - PubMed

My illness got worse after both difficult viral infections and burnout, so those are also causes.

People get the impression that I'm depressed, shut-in, an aspie, or a drug user. I'm just a "sick child", like those bats. If you think Peating in itself would fix anything, then you're wrong, and there are other people with CFS on this forum who would speak to the unresponsiveness of this condition to a healthy lifestyle. I'm interested in what you think of my theory as to why recovery from it is so slow/unresponsive to normal Peating:

Healing Midbrain Damage (chronic Fatigue Syndrome)
 

Recoen

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My point is that I suffer from a physical ailment, rather than a psychological one. The system is poor at recognizing CFS and medical and school systems insisted that I have mental health issues for over a decade. I was just a stupid kid, I didn't know a normal level of fatigue was. Now it's too late to do in-depth testing and hopefully it's something I can treat, rather than something like a pinched nerve.

Childhood CFS is now getting more attention.

Children's experiences of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME): a systematic review and meta-ethnography of qualitative studies - PubMed

My illness got worse after both difficult viral infections and burnout, so those are also causes.

People get the impression that I'm depressed, shut-in, an aspie, or a drug user. I'm just a "sick child", like those bats. If you think Peating in itself would fix anything, then you're wrong, and there are other people with CFS on this forum who would speak to the unresponsiveness of this condition to a healthy lifestyle. I'm interested in what you think of my theory as to why recovery from it is so slow/unresponsive to normal Peating:

Healing Midbrain Damage (chronic Fatigue Syndrome)
I was diagnosed with CFS (among many other things) after a bad EBV reactivation. My CFS is gone following these principles so I wouldn’t discount them. This took 6+years.
 
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My point is that I suffer from a physical ailment, rather than a psychological one. The system is poor at recognizing CFS and medical and school systems insisted that I have mental health issues for over a decade. I was just a stupid kid, I didn't know a normal level of fatigue was. Now it's too late to do in-depth testing and hopefully it's something I can treat, rather than something like a pinched nerve.

Childhood CFS is now getting more attention.

Children's experiences of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME): a systematic review and meta-ethnography of qualitative studies - PubMed

My illness got worse after both difficult viral infections and burnout, so those are also causes.

People get the impression that I'm depressed, shut-in, an aspie, or a drug user. I'm just a "sick child", like those bats. If you think Peating in itself would fix anything, then you're wrong, and there are other people with CFS on this forum who would speak to the unresponsiveness of this condition to a healthy lifestyle. I'm interested in what you think of my theory as to why recovery from it is so slow/unresponsive to normal Peating:

Healing Midbrain Damage (chronic Fatigue Syndrome)

It's all in your head.png
 

orewashin

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Yeah, that's essentially what doctors told me, in an indirect way. But I've never been specifically told that symptoms are "in my head", but that psychological problems are causing my symptoms.

It wasn't apparent that my problems were physical until I started taking T3-only. That removed my brain fog and "cured" my psychiatric symptoms.

The theory that CFS is a state of hibernation fits. Though, my reverse-T3 was low-normal, so again, the mechanism involved in the hibernation state is across the BBB, in the brain, where it converts T4 into reverse-T3.

I was diagnosed with CFS (among many other things) after a bad EBV reactivation. My CFS is gone following these principles so I wouldn’t discount them. This took 6+years.
Can you share more details or link to where you wrote about your ex-CFS?

So you say you also had orthostatic intolerance? Do you still have it? Mine appeared in my preteen years for seemingly no reason.

Did you have sedation/brain fog from T4?
 
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Yeah, that's essentially what doctors told me, in an indirect way. But I've never been specifically told that symptoms are "in my head", but that psychological problems are causing my symptoms.

It wasn't apparent that my problems were physical until I started taking T3-only. That removed my brain fog and "cured" my psychiatric symptoms.

The theory that CFS is a state of hibernation fits. Though, my reverse-T3 was low-normal, so again, the mechanism involved in the hibernation state is across the BBB, in the brain, where it converts T4 into reverse-T3.

When an animal such as a squirrel approaches hibernation and is producing less carbon dioxide, the decrease in carbon dioxide releases serotonin, which slows respiration, lowers temperature, suppresses appetite, and produces torpor.


But in energy-deprived humans, increases of adrenalin oppose the hibernation reaction, alter energy production and the ability to relax, and to sleep deeply and with restorative effect.

In several ways, torpor is the opposite of sleep. Rapid eye movement (REM), that occurs at intervals during sleep and in association with increased respiration, disappears when the brain of a hibernating animal falls below a certain temperature. But torpor isn’t like “non-REM” deep sleep, and in fact seems to be like wakefulness, in the sense that a sleep-debt is incurred: Hibernating animals periodically come out of torpor so they can sleep, and in those periods, when their temperature rises sharply, they have a very high percentage of deep “slow wave sleep.”

Although it is common to speak of sleep and hibernation as variations on the theme of economizing on energy expenditure, I suspect that nocturnal sleep has the special function of minimizing the stress of darkness itself, and that it has subsidiary functions, including its now well confirmed role in the consolidation and organization of memory. This view of sleep is consistent with observations that disturbed sleep is associated with obesity, and that the torpor-hibernation chemical, serotonin, powerfully interferes with learning.

Babies spend most of their time sleeping, and during life the amount of time spent sleeping decreases, with nightly sleeping time decreasing by about half an hour per decade after middle age. Babies have an extremely high metabolic rate and a stable temperature. With age the metabolic rate progressively declines, and as a result the ability to maintain an adequate body temperature tends to decrease with aging.

(The simple fact that body temperature regulates all organic functions, including brain waves, is habitually overlooked. The actions of a drug on brain waves, for example, may be mediated by its effects on body temperature, but this wouldn’t be very interesting to pharmacologists looking for “transmitter-specific” drugs.)

When the body temperature is very much below normal, mental functioning is seriously limited. I think the first question that should be asked about a demented person is "is this the cold brain syndrome, or is something else involved?" When it is known that the brain has shrunken drastically, and filled up with plaques and developed gliosis, we know that something more than a "cold brain" is involved, but we don't know how much function could be regained if the hormones were normalized. Every moment of malfunction probably leaves its structural mark. Early or late, it is good to prevent the functional errors that lead to further damage, and to give the regenerative systems an opportunity to work. Before the final "calcium death" described (above) by Fujita, there are many opportunities for intervening to stop or reverse the process. The older the person is, the more emphasis should be put on protective inhibition, rather than immediately increasing energy production. Magnesium, carbon dioxide, sleep, red light, and naloxone might be appropriate at the beginning of therapy.

[..]cold feet interestingly can cause serious inflammatory problems elsewhere in the body, so a first aid for some of the symptoms of hypothyroidism is just to get some woolly underwear and thick stockings and keep your extremities warm because you can actually cure anemia even without correcting your whole metabolic situation, just by keeping your long bones warmer and reducing the inflammatory substances produced in cold feet.

The idea that schizophrenia is a disease in itself tends to distract attention from the things it has in common with Alzheimer’s disease, autism, depression, mania, the manic-depressive syndrome, the hyperactivity-attention deficit syndrome, and many other physical and mental problems. When brain abnormalities are found in “schizophrenics” but not in their normal siblings, it could be tempting to see the abnormalities as the “cause of schizophrenia,” unless we see similar abnormalities in a variety of sicknesses.


For the present, it’s best to think first in the most general terms possible, such as a “brain stress syndrome,” which will include brain aging, stroke, altitude sickness, seizures, malnutrition, poisoning, the despair brought on by inescapable stress, and insomnia, which are relatively free of culturally arbitrary definitions. Difficulty in learning, remembering, and analyzing are objective enough that it could be useful to see what they have to do with a “brain stress syndrome.”
 

orewashin

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@indeterminacy
I remember the first quote.

I speculated that I could reduce reverse-T3 by keeping warm. It's not well-known on this forum, but cold increases TSH. If I can reduce TSH by keeping warm, and suppress it further by using T3, then T4 production, and therefore pathological reverse-T3 production by the brain would be kept at a minimum.

Cold definitely causes or worsens brain fog for me. Merely being cooler than I should, my cognitive functioning is worse and my sleep is more shallow.

I've been heating liquids lately. Orange juice isn't as appealing heated, but if I add gelatin, then it's more appetizing, somehow, than just warm orange juice.

I tried a dose of naloxone given to me by an acquaintance. It didn't do anything besides improve mental acuity, but that in itself is a positive result, especially because I didn't experience side effects from it.

I wonder what inflammatory substances cold feet can produce. I remember that a woman commented on my warm feet back when I experimented with a hypercaloric diet with sugar and chocolate, but right now my feet are cold.
 

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