Alternative medicine

[GoingThere]

How many of you are trying or did trying some sort of alternative medicine to address kidney related issues?

Gt

[kit78]

I have seen Dr. John Honey in St. Charles IL for 30 years for acupuncture and due to a herniated disc in my lower back he only cracks my upper back and neck.  If you have any disc problems as such never let anyone adjust your back or neck in that area....First rule of thumb.
I have letters I would never work again and because of John, I have been working for since 1997.  He studied from Dr. Guo, www.liferising.com who is in Chicago, Naperville and one other place.  He does Chinese herbs as well.  He has a B formula that moves around stagnated blood.  Works great. 

My daughter had Mono and was so sick she had golf ball sized lumps on her neck. Docs said he never saw it so bad.  Nothing was working. I called John and he told me to have her take a hot bath and while in there rub the skin down to get the lymph nodes working good. Next was to take Yinchiao (yinchow).  This kid was sick as a dog and white as a bed sheet.  In 2 days she was up and running around again!  You had to be there...it was incredible!!!!!!!!!!!

I saw John a few weeks back.  I among all health issues had this gunk coming out of my right eye building in the corner. So while I was there I asked him about it.  He said my liver was so messed up and that why it was happening, plus they were watering all the time as well.  I did go see an eye doc and he couldn't find anything wrong. He also put me on antibiotic drops for 10 days...still no  luck.  But now that I had a long session with John, it's all gone. It take a week or so but it all stopped!   
John says as far as my kidneys go, he want me to see Dr. Guo at least once time and get on some herbs as I have had this "Parasite" as he calls it, for too many years.
Another trick is to breath deep into the belly and slowly blow out and when you just don't have anything left, give a cough outward.  Sounds funny I know, but it's all about balancing the body and getting the Yin & Yang & Chi going. 

Because my thyroid was making my throat close, I canceled my appointment, had my surgery and after I am healed up I will be off to see Dr. Guo in a heartbeat.  Am soooo looking forward to it. 

Dr. Guo is cash/check only $85.00.  Dr. Honey is cash/ check/ Insurance/ and medicare pays 70%  or so and is $100.00 plus he is so out of the box, it's always a good time going to see him.  Am so glad I can go see him now more often. 

Feel free to ask any questions.  Even though you can buy the herbs online at Life Rising, do not do that until you see some who does Acupuncture and Chinese medicine.  These guys are so cool the go out of state to treat people one weekend a month and people come here from all over.

[jjneyjr]

Yes, I am doing my own treatment! 41 weeks in kidney failure way past the point the nephralogist would have put me on dialysis. I am feeling fine so far.

[kit78]

What are you doing may I ask?

[jjneyjr]

Low protein diet consisting of only 20 - 30 grams of high quality animal protein.
I take a supplement called chitosan a fiber made from the shells of shellfish. It will lower the blood creatinine and urea the serum cholesterol and improve your serum haemoglobin levels. Read about it at NIH pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9255718. This will not remove the potassium or phosphorus so I use a sauna every day to lower the potassium and phosphorus and urea.
Cheers,

[GoingThere]

I will definitely try this supplement. Jjneyjr, how much daily do you intake? What are your creat levels?

GT

[jjneyjr]

I take 4 grams a day which is very close to the study 4005 mg a day or 4.05 grams in the study. You have to drink a lot of water or you will be passing a brick.
You cannot take it with any of your other meds especially fat soluble vitamins so you need to schedule it. I take BP meds 3 times a day at 6am , 2pm. 10pm so I take 2 grams of chitosan at 10am, and 2 grams at 6pm. All hail the alarm watch a Timex marvel because without it I would be lost. I was diagnosed with kidney failure about 41 weeks ago. My creatinine was at 6.3 my latest labs done for disability 3 months after ESRD my creatinine was 5.3.  That is a drop of a whole point. They only did a creatinine and albumin 2.6 so I can't give you any more numbers but those.


Cheers,

[jeannea]

GoingThere, please be very careful with supplements. So many of them can interact badly with Prograf or Cyclosporin. The companies are NOT required to list all the ingredients or do any safety tests.

[noahvale]

*

[jjneyjr]

I would always tell my doctors about everything I was planning on doing. No lies.

GT - I am treating myself, no dialysis, so my doctor gives me a lot of lead way in the decisions about my health.

Noah and Jean, both make good points.

Cheers,

[GoingThere]

Don't worry, I won't do anything without a green light from my neph. There is one neph who is all into food supplement. He recommended me L-Glutamin while I was on D.

I've also already searched UpToDate for Chitosan. There is no mention of any interactions between chitosan and antirejection meds.

I know the mentoned research included only 80 patients. But as a veteran statistican I can tell you that medical researches are very "poor" regarding the number of included subjects. If you look at the researches about acute rejections, you can see there are 10, 20, maybe 40 individuals studied.

Recently I've done statistical methods for SCI journal which only included 21 patients. The revisors said it is an important contribution to nephrology. So 80 subjects doesn't sound bad at all .

[jjneyjr]

Very prudent GT. Your posts never led me to believe you would jump into anything blindly!

Cheers,

[GoingThere]

Ok, so Today I had a clinic visit. It went well.
I also asked neph about Chitosan. In approximately 1 hour he gave me a response. There shouldn't be any interactions between Chitosan and prograf, though he order lab retest of prograf level in one week.
He read about the research (I forward him a link) and said that this research is misleading in part where creat and urea should drop. He thinks that people who take Chitosan just lost weight and consequently creat droped. Jjneyjr did you loose a lot of weight between creat levels 6.1 and 5.1?
So he concluded that I have a wrong expectation.
Nevertheless, I'll try it.

GT

[jjneyjr]

Got to love nephrologists, they know it all. 

No, I did not lose any weight but that certainly was the chitosan's original purpose. It did not work so much for losing weight without dieting. It was supposed to bind the excess fat which it does but you don't seem to lose any weight or you have a minimal weight loss 1 to 2 lbs.

If doctors made you well, they would be broke not part of the 1%. 

[GoingThere]

I found this in a chapter about Chitosan:

"Because chitosan is not capable of binding to creatinine in vitro, it was
hypothesized that the effects of chitosan on creatinine and hemoglobin were secondary
to its binding “uremic toxins” in the gastrointestinal tract, leading to improvement
in residual renal function. Symptom improvement could also be attributed to binding
of these toxins and nitrogenous wastes in the gut. Placebo-controlled trials are needed
to confirm the results of this study and to assess the long-term safety and pharmacokinetics
of chitosan in this population."

GT

[jjneyjr]

Nothing about it making you lose weight! 

I use it because it makes me feel so much better. The lowering the creatinine and uremic toxins is just icing on the cake.

Your read tell me to get some and stock up because you know what happened to aspirin (price increase of 3000%).

Thanks for sharing that, where did you find that information?

Cheers,

[GoingThere]

Here in this document!

[jjneyjr]

What a good read that was, sort of up to date at 2003. A couple months back I looked for companies stock that made chitosan but could only find private companies. No investment potential there that I could find. Interesting about the fat solubile vitamins. Thanks for sharing that with us. I think I will do a little stocking of it just in case. I hate paying 3 bucks a bottle for aspirin that really pisses me off!

Best,