As you may know, I was diagnosed with MS in my twenties and I overcame it with implementing a natural lifestyle and natural remedies. One of the key factors I credit to my recovery was eliminating diet soft drinks. What is the link between diet soft drinks and MS?
While I was researching how to heal, I came across Lady Cilento mentioning in her books the importance of a fresh food diet and staying away from sugar, soft drink etc. While I didn’t consume too much sugar, up to that point, I had been a big consumer of diet soft drinks. In those days consumers did not know of the potential dangers.
In high school it had become the ‘in thing’ to have a can of diet soft drink (or soda) for lunch, no food. Diet soft drinks were the new trendy beverages of choice in Australia at that time. So as teenage girls wanting to stay thin, we’d stand around in our lunch break (had no energy to do much else) slowly sipping our drink and chewing on the straws – we were so hungry!
My diet soft drink habit continued at university and was then supplemented with heavy coffee drinking, particularly at assignment and exam times. As well as overloading on saccharin, I had unknowingly become addicted to caffeine. Later when I finished university studies, I decided to wean myself off coffee even though it was then, and still now, totally socially acceptable to be a caffeine addict.
However going cold turkey was quite an unexpected and unpleasant experience.
I had excruciating migraines for three days and all over body aches, etc. Needless to say having gone through caffeine withdrawal once, I have a very healthy respect for its powerful addictive effects. I now mostly drink organic herbal teas or an occasional water-decaffeinated organic coffee and of course lots of filtered water.
But during that same period there was little information in Australia about the dangers of consuming artificial sweeteners and diet soft drinks, and so I continued to drink them until my MS diagnosis. However I then followed Lady Cilento’s writings and eliminated them completely from my diet.
Studies since then as noted in Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions, have indicated that the sugar, artificial sweeteners and phosphoric acid, etc., in soft drinks can have a negative impact on bones and joints. Elaine Hollingsworth in Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry contends that artificial sweeteners are a major cause of MS. I strongly feel my recovery was greatly assisted by eliminating the consumption of diet soft drinks.
I had learned a lot from my research and had taken immediate action to have as many physical treatments I could manage and to clean up my diet plus supplementing with high quality vitamin C powder (with bioflavonoids). My focus and determination was very high and of course I was buoyed by a decrease in my MS symptoms from that first week of corrective treatments.
Do you notice any ill effects from drinking diet soft drinks and products with aspartame?
What do you do when pain medication doesn’t work for you? When you can’t get any relief? I know how this feels because it happened to me and I have to look for alternative solutions.
Those of us who have been in pain or those who are currently battling pain conditions know the personal and emotional costs.
I’m not anti-pharmaceutical or anti-pain medications. There are some great pain and life-saving medications. If they are working for you – thank goodness for them! It’s just that prescribed pain medications did not work for me in the past and so I had to ascertain the cause of my pain and then work to eliminate it at the source.
For the vast majority of people I come into contact in a clinic situation, pain medications are also not working for them and so many have been left in painful limbo. Sometimes those medications may have worked well initially but because the cause of the pain was not addressed, they lost their potency and good effect. Sometimes the side effects outweigh the benefits.
While pain meds are invaluable to handle pain in acute or emergency situations, for long-term chronic pain they can sometimes be temporary ‘band-aid’ solutions that may come with side effects and decreases in efficiency.
So if you do not want to be reliant on prescription medications forever, again it becomes important to deal with WHY you are getting pain and HOW you are going to fix it for the long term.
Of course everybody is different, medications and treatments that have worked for others with similar conditions cannot always be guaranteed to work for you. Different genetics, raised in diverse environments, having been exposed to unique combinations of chemicals and toxins, eating differently, having various personalities, emotional states and abilities to handle stress and disease etc. Likewise the therapies and techniques that worked for me and for my clients cannot be guaranteed but at least they are safe to try and will support your health in other ways.
The reality is that no one can give you a guarantee because people are wonderful, complex beings who can be massively unpredictable. Sometimes the only way to know whether something will work for you is to try, and if that doesn’t work try something else. Keep taking positive action and don’t get angry if your doctor, therapist, medication or supplement doesn’t work straight away for you. More time might be needed, maybe some fine-tuning or perhaps it’s not the right answer for you just now.
I know it can be hard (sometimes excruciatingly hard) but be grateful that you are learning along the way and it is important to keep moving forward. Take responsibility and realise that you have to do something different if you want different and positive results. If you become complacent and keep doing what you have always done, then chances are that you will keep getting the same results and the same pain!
When I was diagnosed with MS and orthodox medicine had no cure and no hope for me, I had to be determined (some called it stubborn) and try out things for myself and persist, keep going even when there was no hope. If I’d given up and prepared for my demise like my neurologist had advised me all those years ago, I would never have recovered, got married, had children and had a wonderful career helping people.
So if you are currently in a similar situation, my heart goes out to you but please whatever you do, don’t give up.
Patience and commitment are extremely important as usually the longer you’ve had a pain condition, the more time and effort it takes to turn it around. It’s a bit like the momentum of a runaway train. Once pain has become entrenched, it develops a momentum of its own which requires a lot of effort to firstly slow down the progression and then to gradually bring it to a stop.
It then takes another mighty effort to reverse the direction of that “pain train” and commence your healing journey. So be prepared to put in your best effort – this is the most important work you’ll ever do!
For more information on how I beat my pain, naturally, you can check out my book DRUG FREE PAIN RELIEF.
At the age of 22 I was diagnosed with MS (multiple sclerosis) and told that I would not be alive for my 23rd birthday!
I healed from MS with my own research and some ‘alternate’ therapies and remedies. The doctors were struck dumb at my recovery!
One aspect of my strategy for recovery was Citamin C. Read on to discover why I believe in the power of Vitamin C!
I actively did my own research about how to heal myself from MS, I was determined that I was going to overcome my prognosis. Luckily my university degree was in journalism which had given me solid research skills. I could also speed read and had the ability to go through large amounts of information to find the ‘treasure’ or important points.
Early on in my research, I was lucky to come across two small but so valuable books Lady Cilento on Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies and The Cilento Way. Actually for all my library research, these books had belonged to my parents and were at home in my father’s office.
Lady Cilento was my earliest female inspiration. She was amongst the first female doctors in Australia and wrote many health and medical articles with her husband Sir Raphael ‘Ray’ Cilento from August 1929 for the then Brisbane Courier newspaper. So by the time I found Lady Cilento’s books she had been writing about health and vitamin supplements for more than 50 years!
These two books gave me the nutritional information that undoubtedly helped turn my health around. People now tend to think that healthy eating and taking vitamins and minerals is some new age thinking but it is mind blowing to me that in fact Lady Cilento and her colleagues and inspirations, such as Dr Linus Pauling (won the Nobel Prize twice), Dr Irwin Stone (author of The Healing Factor), Dr Frederick R Klenner (world authority on the clinical use of vitamin C) and Dr Robert F Cathart (famous orthopaedic surgeon) were using vitamins very successfully in their research, surgeries and clinics for multiple health conditions so many years ago.
Around the same time my MS symptoms had started to decrease as my body was brought back into proper alignment and balance, I started taking mega-doses of vitamin C powder with bioflavonoids (including hesperidin and rutin) because it was indicated in Lady Cilento’s books as being useful in fighting viral, bacterial and arthritic type conditions. The bioflavonoids were important to assist in the fast assimilation by the body.
Unlike many other animals and living things, humans (like monkeys, guinea pigs and fruit bats) do not manufacture their own vitamin C. It cannot be stored in the body and so it has to be consumed regularly in order to survive.
Lady Cilento writes: “Vitamin C is non-toxic, has no side effects, does not build up in the body and any surplus to the body’s needs quickly passes out in the urine …This vitamin protects the body by aiding the adrenal glands to produce cortisone, maintains the strength of all the ‘cementing’ substance between cells, stimulates production of antibodies against germs and the number and effectiveness of the white blood cell.“
The exact cause of MS is unknown (most likely there are multiple causes) but it is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. The MS Society (UK) advises that the immune system, which normally fights infections and protects the body, starts attacking and damaging the coating or myelin around the nerve fibres creating lesions or plagues which then disrupts crucial signals and smooth functioning between the brain and the rest of the body. Damage to the actual nerves can occur as well as myelin loss and this can create a variety of symptoms which tend to increase over time. To this day there is no definitive cure.
So from my research, I knew that MS was neurological and was caused by problems in the myelin sheath and nerve conduction but since my doctors could not help me, I decided that I need to try to rebuild my myelin and strengthen my body through vitamin supplementation in addition to the important corrective bodywork.
Mega-doses of vitamin C were the corner stone of my personal attack on MS.
In his book Food as Medicine, Dr Earl Mindell advises:
“Vitamin C, which is water-soluble, is essential for the formation of collagen, the substance that binds together the cells of connective tissue. Collagen is necessary for the production and growth of new cells and tissues: it also prevent viruses from penetrating the cell membrane … it is especially important in the healing process.”
And of course in an ideal unpolluted, uncontaminated world with ready access to fresh raw food, not genetically modified, organically grown so not exposed to pesticides and other toxic chemicals, we should get all our vitamin needs from our food. But for most people today if you are not able to grow your own food (and a variety of it) then you might like to consider high quality, food-based natural supplements (less expensive synthetic supplements are cheap for a reason and can just expose you to more chemicals and toxins).
My decision back then to use vitamin C supplementation to help repair and support my body is also supported by other doctors now such as Dr Carole Hungerford, who in her book Good Health in the 21st Century writes about how vitamin C assists in the production of neuropeptides (neurotransmitters) and in the repair and synthesis of collagen amongst many other important body functions and uses.
During my research in 1985, I’d also found another interesting quote in The Cilento Way contending that “sodium ascorbate, or vitamin C, is the only antibiotic that will get rid of a virus.”
Because I had no way of knowing definitively what had caused my MS (and my doctors did not know either), I decided that this strategy might also help with the possibility of a viral contribution, so another reason to use vitamin C.
Within four months of bodywork, eating fresh food, no white sugar, soft drink or artificial sweeteners, taking vitamin C plus gradually getting back into exercise, yoga and meditation, every MS symptom disappeared and I was able to return to full-time work.
Years have passed and my good health continues to this day. I still use those strategies to maintain my health. Now I am a health warrior committed to helping others find natural solutions for their pain and suffering.
If you would like to read the whole story, I go into detail about how I beat MS (multiple sclerosis) in my book, Drug Free Pain Relief.
I recommend natural sources of Vitamin C. I love this powder made from certified organic ingredients. It’s Australia’s only entirely natural vitamin C supplement.
So… here’s some real talk about chronic pain and illness (from someone who’s been there).
Sometimes severe or chronic pain is the wake-up call you need to kick yourself into immediate action. We can get complacent with our health and think we can just take a pill and fix everything. That is not always the case, sometimes you have to step up and take urgent action to fix the situation.
If you get a bad diagnosis, you’ll probably go through grief stages such as shock, denial, sadness and anger. You can use an emotive feeling such as anger to energise and fuel your fight back. Those strong feelings can focus and prod you into becoming your own health warrior and fighting – for yourself and your loved ones!
You always have a choice. Whatever your pain condition, you can choose to get a second (or a third) opinion. The medical profession is so specialised that people can be experts in their own field but have little knowledge of alternatives outside their expertise. Medical professionals are also often overworked and are looking after numerous patients who are all unique. Sometimes they don’t have all the information needed to make the best decision (so do your part and always keep them fully informed) and occasionally test results are misinterpreted. There is a reason the term ‘medical opinion’ is widely used.
You already know personally what pain is and how it can make you feel. It can keep grinding you down until you find it hard to remember a time when you weren’t in great pain. You despair of ever feeling good again and anxiety or depression can start to raise its ugly head.
You also probably know how at first people sympathised with you but as the days dragged on into weeks and months, they began to get tired of you and your pain because while it exhausts you, it also exhausts those around you. Then people start to avoid you and slowly you become isolated and lonely in your pain.
But you can fight back and you don’t have to continue to accept your current situation. You can get angry about it and totally annoyed with the unfairness of it all but then decide to use that anger. After all anger is just an emotion or ‘energy in motion’. So you can choose to use that energy in positive ways to your advantage, to motivate and become determined to conquer your pain. You have to dig deep but your power is there, just patiently waiting for you to step up and use it!
Finally sometimes you, and everyone around you, can do everything right and you still get a bad outcome or no improvement in your pain. Sometimes bad things happen to good people but that’s life and beyond our control. It is still important to never give up because you only fail when you stop trying!
On a personal note, when I was diagnosed with MS, pain medications did not work for me and a big motivation at that time was finding relief. If my pain meds had worked, I may have sat back passively, accepted my diagnosis and would probably have rapidly deteriorated and passed away just as my neurologist predicted. Now when I look back, my pain was actually my saviour!
And so this is the power of pain. Once you become determined to fight and overcome it, you have a mission and a different focus, a distraction from your pain and then it becomes your powerful motivation. Because frankly the vast majority of us will do anything to avoid pain.
Then once you overcome it, you will become so empowered and strong. You will come to know that it is not a permanent condition and that you can beat it – you just have to engage the fighter, awaken the warrior in you.
“Pain does not have to mean suffering, it can actually be the birth of a stronger and more powerful you.”
I was only 22 when I was given a death sentence. Spoiler alert, I am still here and this is how I beat MS (multiple sclerosis).
My neurologist had just got back the results from my brain scans, eyesight and hearing tests. He said… “You have MS, multiple sclerosis. You are in the typical age-group and your symptoms are also typical. Your MS is progressing very rapidly, I estimate that you have less than a year. So go home and get your affairs in order, I seriously doubt you will reach your 23rd birthday.
I know that next time I see you, you will be in a wheelchair and once that happens, things will speed up and then it will just be a matter of months … well that’s it. I’m sorry but there is no treatment for multiple sclerosis.”
How could there be no way of treating this? I was young, previously healthy and fit and even though I was in excruciating pain I didn’t feel like I was going to die. I remember looking at my neurologist and thinking – really, is that it? Why are you giving up on me? Surely there is something we can do?
I understood what my neurologist was saying about my condition but whether I was going to accept it, was another thing, I was determined to get better.
The following weeks passed in a haze of disbelief as I researched everything I could about MS and natural ways to heal the body.
The exact cause of MS is unknown (most likely there are multiple causes) but it is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. To this day there is no definitive cure.
My recovery from MS evolved firstly with the discovery of the importance of body structural correction and postural realignment in promoting effective body functioning and repair. While my body had been so contracted and contorted physically, its own healing and correction mechanisms were hampered and severely restricted. By bringing my body back into structural alignment and balance, body systems were able to recommence doing what they needed to do to restore proper health and function.
So around the same time my MS symptoms had started to decrease as my body was brought back into proper alignment and balance, I started taking mega-doses of vitamin C powder with bioflavonoids (including hesperidin and rutin) because it was indicated in Lady Cilento’s books as being useful in fighting viral, bacterial and arthritic type conditions. The bioflavonoids were important to assist in the fast assimilation by the body.
With advice from various books on nutrition, I also cut out caffeine and diet soft drinks.
Once movement became easier, I wanted to continue to improve and keep moving. I began gentle exercise and yoga at home. I practiced meditation most days and made a conscious effort to keep thinking and speaking positively.
I went to see my neurologist for a scheduled follow-up visit. I bounced into his office and told him how two of my major MS symptoms had disappeared with corrective bodywork and my use of superior nutrition and vitamin C. My neurologist was literally struck dumb.
Within four months of bodywork, eating fresh food, no white sugar, soft drink or artificial sweeteners, taking vitamin C plus gradually getting back into exercise, yoga and meditation, every MS symptom disappeared and I was able to return to full-time work.
Years have passed and my good health continues to this day. I still use those strategies to maintain my health. Now I am a health warrior committed to helping others find natural solutions for their pain and suffering.
If you would like to read the whole story, I go into more details about how I beat MS (multiple sclerosis) in my book, Drug Free Pain Relief.
