The other day, a brave mother shared a telling photograph of her beloved son with bruises all over his sweet little face. Thankfully, experienced, instinctive mothers know the desperate plea for help when they see it. This courageous, loving mom needed answers as to why her her son was in excruciating pain, so much so, that it would cause him to punch, hit, and bruise himself.
I understood the frustration of self injury because we’ve lived this scary life of man-made illness and the photo she shared touched me so deeply; it could’ve easily been one of my own. I’ll never shake the sheer dread I used to feel running errands amidst a judging public and we’re still recovering from the costs of personal property damage from a little one in so much pain. The very worst is the living nightmare of helplessness that ingrains trauma and fear into a once relatively normal life. It defies the odds to overcome, but you can.
Our self injury issues looked like punching the face and outer thighs in moments of extreme pain. The hitting was hard enough to cause bruising. We also had headbanging, occurring without warning, which is so frighting because of possible head injury on top of the seemingly elusive cause. It also appeared that urinating was painful despite negative UTI tests.
We were fortunate enough to have our doctor witness a self-injury episode in his office. Because he is also a kinesiologist, he muscle tested during the screaming and head banging and face hitting behavior. He measured the pain to be at a “twenty” and further compared that to a broken bone which would be a “ten.” This was the first definitive explanation of what was happening to our non-verbal child that I’d ever received.
Despite a diagnosis of auto-immune encephalitis from a PhD immunologist, no doctor had ever gone through this side by side with us. No doctor had ever put a measurement, a number, an explanation to the violent behavior so that I could fully connect the reaction to its cause. And, certainly, no doctor had ever solved the problem.
In minutes.
In addition to identifying the exact problem, he also determined the treatment. And he went farther. He treated there in the office. It worked in minutes and perfectly, I achieved the same successful results at home.
Our solution was NAC ( N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine).
I had tried this supplement before, but in far too tiny of a dose to make any impact. Dr. Moore, however, muscle tested and measured exactly how much the body required. It was far more than I had tried, or would ever try on my own. We moved from the self injury episodes being palliated, to their prevention, to their elimination.
NAC wasn’t just a help for AE (PANS), it was also useful for detox. Whether you are using synthetic or herbal antibiotics to kill parasites and/or pathogens, one of the by-products of their death is ammonia which can can get trapped anywhere in the body and brain causing systemic pain. Thankfully, NAC is a hard working, systemic binder and it has many other detoxifying, anti-inflammatory benefits as well.
From time to time, though, we still had problems with painful urination with no urinary tract infection. My clue to this was the hitting of the outer thighs. Digging into my favorite sources, the answers I needed came from a Lyme support group.
This article about Lactic Acidosis in Critical Illness from Pub Med Central was posted which caused me to re-assess our alkaline diet. Even though we are pretty strict, we do eat meat and it’s watermelon season, both are acidic. When the body is in an acidic state it can mimic a PANS ‘flare’ because symptoms can include a sudden change in disposition, rage, nausea, cramping legs and muscles, and painful urination. With chronic, auto-immune disease and especially with leaky gut, it is very easy to slip into this state unless careful attention is made to consume only alkaline foods. The meat and watermelon was enough to tip our bucket. I added extra daily magnesium, a small dose of baking soda with meat consumption alongside a very high quality, bio available mineral supplement from CellCore Biosciences. The combination eliminated the painful urination, leg muscle pain, and hitting the thighs.
In conclusion, to solve the problem of self injury we had to mop up ammonia. The ammonia was coming from die off (detox) and from the (incomplete) digestion of meat. It is very common in the auto-immune state that the body does not cycle well, so the NAC helped mop up extra ammonia that the body just couldn’t. In addition, it is crucial to keep the body in an alkaline state. In a chronic state of illness, the body is often depleted of minerals, easily shifts to the acidic state, and is magnesium depleted. Therefore, constant attention to an alkaline diet, supplementation of minerals and magnesium, as well as some baking soda to help offset any infraction of diet went the distance to permanently stop the screaming, headbanging, self injury such as hitting oneself in the face and thighs.
We also have done a massive overhaul of detoxing the body of parasites, pathogens, biotoxins, metals, and retro-viruses. It all has been necessary for healing.
The Detox Depot 