Nearly 100 Doctors Have Tried To Diagnose This Man’s Devastating Illness — Without Success

[Mito]

“For Bob Schwartz, one of the hardest things about his unnamed illness is sleeping in snatches.

When Schwartz, who battles insomnia, does manage to fall asleep, he wakes up every 90 minutes to urinate copiously. Most nights he sleeps a total of four hours.

Chronic sleep deprivation is only one symptom of a consuming and debilitating constellation of problems that has astonished and baffled nearly 100 doctors around the country with whom Schwartz has consulted since 2016.

Despite his herculean efforts, the 59-year-old retired medical malpractice lawyer turned philanthropist still doesn’t have a diagnosis.

In addition to his nocturnal urinary problem, Schwartz suffers from massive shifts of body fluids when he stands up or lies down, very high blood pressure, chronic digestive disorders, severe hormonal imbalances, muscle wasting on his left side and exhaustion.

He has traveled to the Mayo Clinic twice and to the Cleveland Clinic. Last fall, Schwartz, who lives near Detroit, spent a week at the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health. The highly selective 11-year-old effort by the nation's preeminent research hospital is designed to diagnose the most perplexing illnesses.

Yet the former marathon runner remains what one Mayo specialist dubbed him: “a zebra among zebras” — medical slang for an extraordinarily rare case.

NIH doctors have identified an apparent reason for his symptoms — his veins are grossly enlarged and too stretchy — but they don’t know why or how to treat it. And they’ve never seen a similar case.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...b0e8c6-aeef-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html

 

[Kram]

“For Bob Schwartz, one of the hardest things about his unnamed illness is sleeping in snatches.

When Schwartz, who battles insomnia, does manage to fall asleep, he wakes up every 90 minutes to urinate copiously. Most nights he sleeps a total of four hours.

Chronic sleep deprivation is only one symptom of a consuming and debilitating constellation of problems that has astonished and baffled nearly 100 doctors around the country with whom Schwartz has consulted since 2016.

Despite his herculean efforts, the 59-year-old retired medical malpractice lawyer turned philanthropist still doesn’t have a diagnosis.

In addition to his nocturnal urinary problem, Schwartz suffers from massive shifts of body fluids when he stands up or lies down, very high blood pressure, chronic digestive disorders, severe hormonal imbalances, muscle wasting on his left side and exhaustion.

He has traveled to the Mayo Clinic twice and to the Cleveland Clinic. Last fall, Schwartz, who lives near Detroit, spent a week at the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health. The highly selective 11-year-old effort by the nation's preeminent research hospital is designed to diagnose the most perplexing illnesses.

Yet the former marathon runner remains what one Mayo specialist dubbed him: “a zebra among zebras” — medical slang for an extraordinarily rare case.

NIH doctors have identified an apparent reason for his symptoms — his veins are grossly enlarged and too stretchy — but they don’t know why or how to treat it. And they’ve never seen a similar case.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...b0e8c6-aeef-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html

Until 2016, Schwartz said, he was “the epitome of health.” A vegetarian since high school, he never smoked or drank alcohol. A lifelong and enthusiastic athlete, he ran 10 miles a day and played basketball.

I'd love to see a full metabolic panel on the guy..

 

[yerrag]

Seeing that regular doctors have a lot of false indoctrination up their veins, Schwarz may get worse as he increases his list to 1000.

He's likely seeing specialists and getting nowhere - urologist for his urination, endocrinologist for his hormonal imbalance, etc. etc. and he's not seeing the big picture and the important relationships between his symptoms and a general underlying cause.

In my case, I see my excessive urination as a sign of a heavy endotoxin load that the body is constantly having to excrete. I could stop this my ceasing to take proteolytic enzymes to lyse my vascular plaque, and that would keep endotoxin from being released into the bloodstream at a higher rate. I have extreme high blood pressure as well, and I believe it is also related to endotoxins as well. So without an effort to reduce my body's endotoxin stores, this condition won't go away. So do I want to urinate a lot now and for the foreseeable near future, or risk having the problems causative of high blood pressure down the long and winding road? I choose to urinate a lot, even having to wake up 3-4x a night, and hope it doesn't take too long for my endotoxin stores to be significantly reduced. I'll have to take more electrolyte and water-soluble vitamins as they get depleted with the excess urination while I'm at it.

Excess urination at night isn't a problem, it is the body's solution to a problem. But Schwarz has to find out himself why the body is acting that way, and find out what the real problem is. The urologist will in all likelihood find a way to stop the frequent urination, and then interfere with the body's need to detox. Small wonder Bob Schwarz isn't getting anywhere. He's getting second and third opinions from a macaque, a bonobo, and a chimpanzee.

 

[methylenewhite]

"Despite his herculean efforts, the 59-year-old retired medical malpractice lawyer turned philanthropist still doesn’t have a diagnosis."
So he managed to ruin enough medical careers to get that rich to become philanthropist. It's karma...

 

[Diokine]

Sounds like a complete failure of melanopsin signalling and critical reduction of phosphodiesterase activity, resulting in gross elevations of cGMP and loss of vascular smooth muscle tone.

edit: just kidding i made that up

 

[schultz]

Progesterone should fix him right up.

or not, who knows. I'd try it if I were him though based on what Ray has said about estrogen/progesterone and the circulatory system.

Progesterone, not estrogen, is the coronary protection factor of women.
Estrogen affected the liver’s production of clot-regulating proteins, and it also relaxed large veins, allowing blood pooling that slowed the blood sufficiently to give it time to form clots before returning to the lungs.

But one of estrogen’s long established toxic effects, the reduction of tone in veins, was turned into something like a “negative risk factor”: The relaxation of blood vessels would prevent high blood pressure and its consequences, in this new upside down paradigm. This vein-dilating effect of estrogen has been seen to play a role in the development of varicose veins, in orthostatic hypotension, and in the formation of blood clots in the slow-moving blood in the large leg veins.

In the 1970s, after reading Szent-Gyorgyi’s description of the antagonistic effect of progesterone and estrogen on the heart, I reviewed the studies that showed that progesterone protects against estrogen’s clotting effect. I experimented with progesterone, showing that it increases the muscle tone in the walls of veins, which is very closely related to the effects Szent-Gyorgyi described in the heart.

 

[Tarmander]

The doctors are probably way over complicating things.

 

[DaveFoster]

"Despite his herculean efforts, the 59-year-old retired medical malpractice lawyer turned philanthropist still doesn’t have a diagnosis."
So he managed to ruin enough medical careers to get that rich to become philanthropist. It's karma...

Irony: more iron than this Hercules can apparently lift.