Reading Salvial_Ten's journal

My dad has finally starting going to another doctor. This one isn't being paid by a nursing home or letting us run a thirty day free trial at the clinic...This one is actually willing to take medicaid insurance and keep our co-payments low and is also my grandmother's doctor.

And he had some blood tests run on my father and this time everyone is in agreement that he's bipolar...like his younger brother and sister, and like some of his aunts and uncles (which I've never met). This is alot more believable than dementia and like the doctor in Indiana claimed was my father being on the verge of turning into a vegetable.

But really, at this point, I don't think I'm willing to believe a damn thing. We've been pushed around and ignored and lied to so damn much that I think I'm about ready to just throw my hands in the air and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Though, I think my mother would feel better if I didn't so I won't. She also wants to have me tested for BPD. I don't blame her for wanting the tests done, I do have a high risk of it after all. Besides, I think I want to know.

In other news I'm looking forward to leaving the country in roughly thee days and not coming back till about halfway through the month. I am not however looking forward to knowing what I got on the research paper that made me late for the last lecture before the trip.

--Jami

You fail it.

Supposedly, I have BPD/Bipolar Disorder I/Manic-Depressive Illness... and yet, smoking weed has proven definitively amongst my friends and family to be my saving grace. It's not the only thing that can help BPD, but it is one. Now, I am not saying that it would work for everyone, but there have been anecdotal histories done on patients (actual studies cannot be undertaken to my knowledge, because back in the 30s when THC was banned, testing of it was also banned...) showing the efficacy of the 'drug' in the treatment of bipolar manias as well as bipolar rages.

Beyond that... I have finally found a breathing practice/ Pranayama practice that purports to quell Bipolar Disorder's worst manifestations. I am willing to try it out, if only because several years ago, I found another Pranayama breathing practice that, when practiced daily, effectively removed every trace of my asthma. It's just that it required an extensive and time-consuming daily commitment. It involved several hundred daily repetitions. As a 'side note', I'd have to say that the daily chanting practice which I began, for all practical purposes, on 4/20 ;D, requires controlled breathing, and no trace of the asthma was there after the first 7-10 days...and that time of year was the worst for my allergies that triggered the asthma in the past; so, I believe the increase in lung volume from chanting, as well as the auto-suggestion part of it had a tremendously beneficial effect.

The Pranayama breathing practice that is useful in healing BPD, involves harmonizing the lunar and solar breaths...i.e., the ida and pingala that wind their way around the central channel in the spinal column-the shushumna. Apparently, people with BPD have the air coming predominantly out of the wrong nostril at the wrong times of day. I know this sounds kinda wierd, but if you close off each nostril seperately, and hold your other hand beneath the open nostril, you can feel that one nostril is has more forceful air coming out of it than the other, and this changes throughout the day.

Also, harmonizing the lunar and solar breaths requires only a few minutes at a time... unlike the breathing practice which purports to heal asthma, and IMHO does. :-) Harmonizing the solar and lunar breaths is all about balance. Theoretically, this all makes sense, because BPD is an imbalance of the nervous system in reality.

So basically, I have developed my own two-pronged approach to BPD that involves the use of THC, and then, the undertaking of this breathing practice. I consider myself a test subject.

IMHO, I think the THC does the same thing that drugs like Depakote and Lamictal do... in other words, it treats the symptoms. It just does a better job, cause mother nature is the shit. But, these breathing practices from the yogic tradition, which is not a religion by the way, which are also a part of the Indian Ayurvedic healing tradition... get to the root cause, and fix it. For that reason, I am willing to try it myself, and to stop using THC and see if the breathing practices will end the problem. I suspect that they might.

Beyond that, I would tell you that so many times people get diagnosed incorrectly. If I had a nickel...

Anyway, basic Ayurvedic healing draws upon building up ojas, prana, and tejas. Ojas comes from what you eat, prana is your energy and breath intake, and tejas is sound. So a combination of eating wholistically, normalizing your breathing patterns (most of us breath so shallowly it is wonder that more people aren't sick and imbalanced all the time...), and basically listening to music that soothes the savage beast is in order. Apparently, eating healthy, remembering to breathe (a little more to it than that, but...), and listening to relaxing music or sounds is the ticket. But it HAS to be done regularly...

All of these things, I suspect, if they were done by most of us, would rid us of the majority of our health problems, and then the medical industry would have no one to make money off of...hmmmm.. except the broken bones, and heart abnormalities, and birth defects, and deeply entrenched infections. But, there have been instances of people having their Stage IV terminal cancer completely disappear, and having their bloodstreams show no trace of HIV-antibodies, when once they had full-blown AIDS. People have recovered from these kinds of grave illnesses with the use of Ayurvedic healing, which makes me more and more convinced that using THC is only like a bandaid, just like pharmeceuticals... and Ayurvedic healing is the ticket.

And after all, who cares what the diagnosis is, if the symptoms disappear and you are healthy again. I know I'll never care if I actually was correctly diagnosed with BPD if the symptoms just vanish. Then I can get on with living a happy and beautiful life... which to be honest, is what most of us want. Even those of us who have been used to nothing but misery...and/or used to taking care of it in our loved ones, as you have had to do.

Just some food for thought. It's technically not edible, unless you print this out, tear it into little pieces, and bake it in some mac n' cheese. ;P

If mountain goats like living at high elevations, why do none live in high rise apartment buildings?

This post was edited by rosyxxx on Jun 05, 2005.