Very Wistful About That Ms Discovery ...

[Tachy Phlegming]

For those having a bad-symptom day or an otherwise bad time of it, this is to distract you or make you smile for a few minutes (I hope), and is dedicated to your enjoyment.

Here is the link to the article recently posted on here:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nation...article1372414/

And here is the new version :

Researcher's labour of love leads to POTS breakthrough

Chase Ravioli was a seemingly healthy 37-year-old when she began to experience strange attacks of high pulse, numbness, temporary vision loss and difficulty breathing. They were classic signs of dysautonomia, a debilitating neurological disease.

It was 1995 and her husband, Salome Bologna, a professor of medicine at the University of Oro in Italy, set out to help. He was determined to solve the mystery of POTS ? an illness that strikes people in the prime of their lives but whose causes are unknown and whose treatments are all over the map but not completely effective.

What he learned in his medical detective work, scouring dusty old books and using ultra-modern imaging techniques, could well turn what we know about POTS on its head (or on its feet, as patients would like to be): Dr. Bologna's research suggests that POTS is not, as widely believed, a cardiac or neurological condition, but a vascular-metal disease, similar to what new research is indicating for MS. In MS, veins and arteries are clogged by iron deposits. In POTS, by contrast, gold binds to acetylcholine receptors and is also deposited in the vascular endothelium.

More radical still, the experimental reverse alchemical chelation Dr. Bologna had his wife undergo offers hope that POTS, which afflicts .5 million people in the United States, can be cured and even largely prevented. Chelation is a process by which a metal is compounded with another substance which then takes the metal out of the body. Alchemy is the science of creating gold out of other substances. Reverse alchemical chelation transforms the gold into a sulfur-containing compound which is then expelled as flatus.

?I am confident that this could be a revolution for the diagnosis and treatment of dysautonomia,? Dr. Bologna said in an interview.

Fighting for his wife's health, Dr. Bologna looked for answers in the medical literature. He found repeated references, dating back a century, to excess gold as a possible cause of POTS . The precious metal can cause high pulse and anxiety, hallmarks of the disease. Using ultrasound to examine the nerves of the autonomic nervous system and vascular endothelia, Dr. Bologna made a startling find: In more than 90 per cent of people with dysautonomia, including his spouse, there was gold in these structures. In people without POTS, there was none of the precious metal.

More striking still was that when Dr. Bologna used a simple reverse alchemical chemical technique to unclog veins and get blood flowing normally again, many of the symptoms of POTS disappeared. The procedure is similar to iron chelation. His wife, who had the chelation, has not had an attack since.

The initial studies done in Italy were small but the outcomes were dramatic. In a group of 65 patients with never-ending multi-symptom POTS (the most common form) who underwent chelation procedure, the amount of gold in the brain and heart fell sharply, to 12 per cent from 50 per cent; in the two years after surgery, 73 per cent of patients had no symptoms.

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A researcher, Mark Thespot, an adjunct professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, is urging patients to send him MRI scans of their heads and necks so he can probe the Bologna theory further. Dr. Mark Thespot is a world-renowned expert in imaging who has developed a method of measuring gold buildup in the brain and heart.

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Dysautonomia societies in Canada and the United States, however, have reacted far more cautiously to Dr. Bologna's conclusion.

The U.S. society is particularly against this research, discouraging patients from getting tested or seeking chelation treatment. Rather, it continues to promote drug treatments used to alleviate symptoms, which include mestinon, beta blockers, florinef, midodrine, and most other medications described in the PDR. The reason for this is that the reverse alchemical chelation converts the gold into sulfur compounds and produces only flatus.

The U.S. Society wants the patients to preserve the gold in their veins until such time as a different technique which allows the elimination of the gold deposits as solid gold bowel movements is developed.

POTS patient Ravioli said ?There might be a point to waiting. I was always treated terribly at the doctor?s office; if my bowel movements were worth a million dollars to my doctor, I?d be treated as if I were worth my weight in gold. If I had any further complications, I?d know I?d be treated promptly. Having done the reverse alchemical chelation, I?m not exactly the valuable patient I might have been.?

Ziti said ?I wouldn?t be shuttled from doctor to doctor for my various symptoms because all of the sudden, everyone would specialize in dysautonomia. Heck, I could charge my doctors for my visits and all I would need to do is produce a stool sample whenever I needed medical care.?

Another (anonymous) POTS patient said simply ?I?d like to see for myself how emotional stress, excitement, and anxiety produce a high pulse and fainting because my doctors kept telling me about that for years and it never made any sense to me. Now everyone is saying that they?re pretty sure that the doctors will have this emotional reaction to their POTS patients when they see the gold stools! I?ll finally be able to give the devil his due.?

The President himself has gotten involved with this search for a chelation process which allows the gold simply to be excreted as gold. He has indicated that he thinks that this product of POTS patients might be the solution to the medical care crisis in this country. He indicated that education about dysautonomia would be stepped-up so that doctors could mine many currently undiagnosed patients for gold. Of the current reverse alchemical chelation protocol, the President said only ?That just stinks.?

Many people with dysautonomia, though, are impatient for results. Chatter about chelation is frequent in online POTS support groups, and patients are scrambling to be part of the research, particularly when they hear the testimonials. They think by and large that the search for a chelation procedure where they produce gold stools for the price of a Big Mac is a pipe dream.

Radar Blip, a 49-year-old resident of Buffalo, was diagnosed with POTS a decade ago and has suffered increasingly severe attacks, especially in the heat. (Heat sensitivity is a common symptom of POTS.) His symptoms were so bad that he was unable to work and closed his ice-chip shop.

Mr. Blip was tested and then had the reverse alchemical chelation. He began to feel better almost immediately.

?I felt good. I felt totally normal. I felt like I did years ago,? he said. He has not had a series of POTS crises since.?

As part of the research project, Mr. Blip's siblings have also been tested. His two sisters, both of whom have POTS, have significant blockages and gold deposits, while his brother, who does not have POTS, has neither gold buildup nor blocked arteries.

It is well-established that the symptoms of POTS are caused by defects in the autonomic nervous system. When those messages are blurred by gold, the autonomic nervous system malfunctions, causing all manner of woes, including blurred eyesight, frequent numbness in the limbs and even fainting.

While he is convinced of the significance of his discovery, Dr. Bologna recognizes that medicine is slow to accept new theories and even slower to act on them. Regardless, he can take satisfaction in knowing that the woman who inspired the quest, and perhaps a dramatic breakthrough, has benefitted tremendously and that doctors will probably be treating POTS patients with deep respect, knowing they have heart, minds, veins, (and maybe one day even x!) of gold.

Dr. Bologna's wife, Chase, has undergone a battery of scans and neurological tests and her dysautonomia is, for all intents and purposes, gone.

?She no longer has a heart of gold but still and all, this is probably the best prize of the research,? he said.

[ramakentesh]

Hilarious - very well written. I loved it.

[dakota]

That was great, Tachy. I am impressed every day with the talent, humor, brainpower and compassion of the people on these boards.

Ramakentesh, I love your "Beware of Gravity" avatar!

[erikainorlando]

So funny...still laughing.

[erik]

You are a POTS of gold, Tachy. I'm lovin' it. While some may poo poo this "Bologna theory" I remain a fervent believer in this and most other bologna theories out there. It seems there are accusations of conspiracy or bias, since the researcher just happens to be from the University of Oro... but I find that to be a coincidence. Personally, I'm more suspicious Dr. Zamboni who just happened to come up with a vermicelli-thin theory promoting the even smoothing & resurfacing of the veins for MS... it's clearly just a ploy to recycle his grandpa's patent before it expires and sell the little zamboni devices to do the treatment... you would be amazed where nanotechnology is going nowadays!

But I get a better vibe from your Dr. Bologna. I will trade my current woes for a life of sulfurous flatulence, if that's what it takes... and I hereby pledge to donate all my stool to charity. Sign me up! I'm ready to be an OG in this reverse all-chemical chill-nation thing! Just call me Stoolio.

I'm not name dropping here or anything, but I happened to grow up with Dr. Mark Thespot who later came up with the novel imaging techniques. "It's a little known fact there Normy", that his first name is actually Xavier, though like G. Gordon Liddy he prefers to have his middle be more prominent for whatever reason. Never figured that out... just a strange guy I guess.

BTW, is there a chance that Austin Power's nemesis Goldmember was actually just suffering this same condition... and "expressing" it differently? Like a different POTS subtype? Just curious.

[Tachy Phlegming]

Indeed, "Fe" and "fer" are for iron, so I thought I'd need some congruence there ...

I agree about Zamboni and the patent.

I'm glad to hear Bologna sounds more trustworthy than Zamboni to you.

I'm not so sure about the gold skin/clothes thing. I mean we know these are invisible illnesses...