Critical Importance of Reducing Stress for Recovery from GDD... and Everything Else.

Stress, the term used in Medicine is Allostatic Load (AL), which describes the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events, I have focused on decreasing/managing stress in all my in-person discussion with GDD sufferers, and also in a number of blogs. A recent paper in JAMA reported that breast cancer subjects with high AL had 50% higher all-cause mortality than those in the lowest AL category. So this has put numbers to the effect of stress. Also, in passing, I very much like the analysis of outcomes reflecting all-cause rather than just cancer -related, because all bad things essentially effect everything: heart, brain, etc and not just breast cancer and metastases in these patients.

So this number can be translated to basically all other forms of serious disease, which includes GDD. Unfortunately compared to many diseases, there isn't the respectability and recognition with GDD that comes with other diseases such as cancer and infection, since it is a shunned disease, as essentially all adverse reactions to medical interventions are... at least initially. No one wants to hear about it, so they don't know it.... This actually reminds me of what a Czech radiologist had told me in 1992, just after the country was liberated from communism: all Czechs had to learn Russian from Gr 1 - 12 (equivalent) but no one could speak it. This is essentially saying if you don't want to know about something you won't learn it. This is generally the way in formal medicine and adverse reactions to established care.. no (few) doctors want to know about it, they want to stick their head in the sand and hope it goes away.... I digress somewhat but this is a large part of AL with GDD.

Moist patients with GDD are first confronted by physicians who say: " your kidney function is normal so you cannot be sick from Gadolinium". Large AL brick. This is often followed by: "you need psychiatric help". Another large brick of AL. This is then often compounded by the family members/ parents of the sufferer, who, listening to the doctors, then tell the sufferer: " you can't be sick from Gd, because the doctor told us it can't have made you sick". That is another major brick. The brain fog makes it impossible for you to keep your job and you lose it and become unemployed. Another major brick. You go to major centers to investigate your affliction, and after thousands of dollars they tell you you don't have ALS, but this could be COVID long haul. Another major brick. Then destitute, another major brick. Then your partner leaves you because you are nuts and jobless. Another major brick.. GDD sufferers more than the majority of sufferers of other diseases, experience a greater amount of AL related to their disease. Enough AL bricks to build their own Alcatraz.

The bottom line, when you get GDD ,and as importantly, when you start chelation treatment, you have to try to reduce your AL as much as you can. I am quite certain that the AL cytokines are probably very similar to the GDD and chelation cytokines, so it is important to relax-focus to minimize all the unnecessary stress that you can. Unfortunately for most of us, there are stressors that we cannot easily avoid, so we need to learn to manage them better. In modern terms this may be called mindfullness. This is an important part of treatment and recovery > calming tools to manage AL. When I see an individual come to me for chelation treatment, and they arrive with a support family member or friend, I always feel a major sigh of relief, this is the equivalent of a full wall of AL that that person is spared of, and I become more confident that they will do well with chelation and will require fewer chelations. Family/ partner support is so critical... If you don't have ti, you will just have to focus more on being your own sanctuary. That is also one reason I like to have subjects be chelated together in the same room, so they feel they are part of a community and not alone. This on its own removes a few large AL bricks.

Richard Semelka, MD.