Why magesium is the business

Firstly, big apols for the tardiness of this newsletter.

A comination of my wife recently re-starting work, looking at secondary schools with my daughter Iris and my son Floyd being sent home with the rest of this class mates as one girl in his class has a +ve PCR test meant time was in short supply this week.

If you have heard that the PCR test is suffering from false positives but weren’t sure exactly how to consider that stats, this article sums it up nicely and frankly should give everyone casue for concern, click the link to check it out.

Except of course the right “honerable” Matt Hancock, who does not

actually seem to understand what a false positive is and when pushed just denies everything.

Click the link below to check him out on Sky news cracking under the most feeble of questionning.

Anyhoo…….back to this weeks newsletter:

She is a steely eyed scot woman of 83 years of age and not a person to be trifled with.

This was very clear from our first meeting.

Her communication was clear and direct and the steel in her voice was masterful.

“I don’t believe in taking supplements”…..and then silence.

I have told you once and I will not tell you again.

The question had been something like, “do you ever take supplements to help fill the gap between what you can get from your diet and what you need to be healthy?”

I broached the subject on one other visit, but my gentle suggestions on vitamin D and magnesium were swotted away like Gulliver twatting a Lilliputian.

Now we have a have set of rules to remember in the Core Concepts in Chiropractic Nutrition course, “Core commandments” if you will and number 8 is:

I will not nag anyone to take supplements or change their lifestyle.

If I really think it is important for my care to deliver significant and sustainable results, I will re-visit it a few times with care and respect and if it is needed I will revise down my prognosis accordingly.

If I really, really think they will not make changes then I may choose to not accept the for care.

I do not want my reputation tarnished by poor results if the patient was non-compliant.

The chronic fatigue syndrome peeps are the classic for this.

So I have cared for Esther for over 2 years and got to know her better and visa versa.

Around 8 months ago she came in for a check up and mentioned pain in her left groin with radiating pain into her anterior thigh and posterior buttock.

Examination was pretty clear, her hip was very stiff and painful, given her age of 85, it was pretty reasonable to consider a degenerative issue.

Now I have many patients with degeneration is all sorts of places who respond wonderfully to care.

Function improves and symptoms reduce but…..I tried my best to help her with various techniques, but it really did not make a bit of difference.

When she came back in this week, she announced with a spark of delight that she had been taking magnesium supplements and some cod-liver oil and the pain in her hip had disappeared.

I felt pretty foolish, here is a 85 year old telling me all about how magnesium and vitamin D (via cod liver oil) has resolved her pain.

Honestly I was p***ed.

I had forgotten my own rule and not given her the opportunity to to change her lifestyle “later”.

The facts are that magnesium is a really sweet anti-inflammatory.

Check this out, pregnant women have blood taken, then are injected with magnesium sulphate, then they have blood taken again.

Then the two sample are “challenged” with lipopolysaccharide (LPS – from the cell wall of nasty bad bacteria).

The results clearly show that the blood taken after the magnesium injection produced far less inflammatory cytokine (tumour necrosis factor – alpha for the nerds out there) than the before magnesium.

The truth is I got a little too comfortable with Esther and her achy bits in her monthly checks and I should have considered discussing nutrition again.

In fact, the same session I did actually get her to take 4000 iu vitamin D with some K2, result.

The lessons that often stick are the ones associated with emotional pain, they make you remember.

ACTION TO TAKE

– Keep an eye out for those longer term patients, are you treating them as keenly as you do the newer ones?

– Consider magnesium with all your chronic pain patients.

– Do not ask Matt Hancock any questions on stats, he cannot handle it.