all natural = always healthy! wooty toot toot

[Heddi]

So patient comes in who poo-poo's medicine...."forced" in by her loving family. Hates being in the hospital, sure she's gonna get sicker here than anywhere. May be true, depending on whether or not I feel like washing my hands in between patients. Luck of the draw sometimes :)

Anyhoo, I work on a cardiac floor and all kinds of stuff makes your heart go wonky, especially electrolytes, like magnesium and potassium. And when I say "make your heart go wonky," i mean "make your heart stop working like it should"

So this woman comes in because of chest pain and palpitations and she was turning a lovely shade of orange (literally orange), her stomach looks like she's 45 years pregnant, her eyeballs are orange and they do some tests in the ER and her liver is the size of a watermelon and her heart is about 4 beats away from exploding, her kidneys have completely shut down, and every lab work was just out of whack so she's admitted and we're trying to figure out why this seemingly normal 26 year old has the body functions of a 200 year old and then we find out that she's like this because she "doesn't believe in medicine". Oh and she also starts hallucinating and forgetting who she is and talking crazy stuff.....

Okay. I mean, medicine exists, so the idea of not believing in it is like "I don't believe in air!!11" It's there....there's no believing or disbelieivng.

anyway.

So she "doesn't believe in Medicine" so she takes any and every supplement available in the store. The boyfriend or husband (not sure which), at the request of the MD's, brings in the "supplements" she's using so we can see if that's why all of her precious organs are about to go tits up. And they bring in TWO brown grocery bags---the big bags---of supplements. And she takes these supplements every day, multiple times a day.

One is for PMS and another is for acne. She takes one for dry skin and takes one for memory. Most of them she doesn't know why she takes them other than she read an article that this one helps with bone growth and that one stops your hair from falling out and this one, when taken with that one, makes your labia shrink and your butthole turn a lovely shade of pink.

All in all, there were over 60 bottles of different potions and pills and elixers and lotions. No two were alike....so these weren't duplicates. They were all very professionally bottled with guarantees of purity and excellence. And she took over 60 pills a day in various quantities....two of these to help with sleep tonight but one plus another tomorrow to help mental acumen.

So her labs come back, and her potassium and magneium are at nearly lethal levels. It takes all we can do to get the one up to normal and the one down from lethally high.

Her liver is shot from the supplements. This is a fact. While I am not such an expert, the pharmacist and MD who were looking over her treasure trove of alternativism immediately saw several that were hepato-toxic (posions the liver) esp when mixed together, or taken over a long period of time.

The lady has been in the hospital for quite some time, and her liver will never be functional again. That is why she is orange---jaundice. That is why her stomach is so distended it's about to burst---ascites. That's why she's acting crazy---hepatic encephalopathy. Just to get the ammonia level down (which causes encephalopathy, ammonia levels are too high and start affecting brain function), we have to give her Lactulose, a powerful laxitive that binds to ammonia and excretes it through stool. So she's got a tube up her ass to collect her massive amounts of shit.

They have tapped her stomach three times already just to get some of the ascites (fluid) out of her abdomen. The first time they drained nearly 4 liters but had to stop because her blood pressure could dump from losing that much fluid so quickly.

She'll be getting tapped pretty much three times a week from now on because her liver can't process proteins since, yanno, it's failing.

She also has kidney failure because of these supplements as well. She has had 4 straight days of dialysis to pull off the toxins and fluids, but her kidney function isn't coming back, so it looks like she's going to be on dialysis for the rest of her life as well.

She's so swollen that we can't get IV's in her easily, so we had to put in some central lines and PICC lines....pretty invasive things.

She's going to die, and she's going to die because she took things that she shouldn't have taken. She's going to die because these "all natural" cures have killed her liver and kidneys and are about to kill her brain if we can't keep the ammonia level down. Oh yea, and her heart is totally fucked up not just from the supplements, but from the damage to the kidneys and liver. Her blood pressure goes from 220/115 to 70/palp in a matter of hours because of how fucked up her kidneys are.

She has already gone into cardiac arrest twice, and brought back. She was intubated, but we pulled the tube and she's breathing on her own.

But remember---it's only people who take Rx drugs that have reactions, or that suffer side effects. Rx drugs are the only ones that practice unethical marketing, that target people with a "one pill cures all" remedy. Only Rx drugs are problematic. Take a natural herbal supplement and you'll never suffer a side effect or anything! Because it's natural.

Of course I'll not post in the health lounge because it's only a matter of 3 posts before someone says "Oh well she should have talked with a nutritionist, it's her own fault that she is like that because NO ONE should ever take supplements without researching" but the reality is that a very very small percentage of people research supplements.

Husband/boyfriend even said that when she went to the herbalist store where she got these pills, every time she went in with one ailment, they would reccomend another pill. When she came in and her skin was the colour of a basketball, they suggested a handy topical lotion, rather than getting herself to an emergency room because of the jaundice.

----

This is something I was going to post a long time ago but didn't. This girl was 26 years old and was in the hospital, between my floor and the ICU, for over 3 months. From the day she stepped in, hateful of being there but forced by those who loved her, she didn't leave again until she was on hospice and died a week later at a long term care facility.

She was 26 years old and was developmentally delayed, and it was an obvious developmental delay. The wonderful folks at the supplement store should be hung by their fucking toes for continuing to sell this girl who was not "all there" pill after pill, supplement after supplement, lotion to cure her lethal liver failure......

But there's no ETHICS ISSUE there. MD's are the only ones that do things unethically...never the naturopaths or holistics...bunch of fucking murderers....

She is dead because she was sold the "if they prescribe it then that means its bad" and "there's no such thing as too much natural".

She is dead and she was 26, and she was my patient and I will never forget her orange eyes and always bleeding body....skin bleeding, eyes bleeding, nose bleeding mouth bleeding vagina and anus bleeding...she had no coagulation because of the liver failure. She peed one time in 3 months because of the kidney failure. She never knew who or where she was for more than 5 minutes because of the encephalopathy.

[trotsky]

1. What a tragic yet important story.

26 years young, killed by the "natural" freaks. But no, as you say, it's only the EVUL PHARMA MEDISIN that kills people ZOMG WTF?!!1!

Heddi, you really should consider posting this in Health. It needs to be out there. People need to know this shit is dangerous too - and with no one to regulate quantities or interactions, it's far too easy to get into the trap this poor young woman did.

Thanks for sharing this here.

[Heddi]

3. It's pointless to

because she's not the first one I've seen in this condition because of taking supplements. One was an old man who took anything that had the word "natural" on the bottle...he wanted to live to be a billion years old. He came in in the same condition, basically, but I can't remember if he died or if we were able to tune him up enough to live a couple of more months before dying at home.

When i posted that story, it wasn't but 2 minutes later when the appologists came out and were all "Oh, well that's why RESEARCH is the key and if he didn't do his RESEARCH and talk to a LICENSED NATUROPATH HOLISTIC then he really was setting himself up for failure"

I, and others, had the feeling that MOST People don't do research before taking herbs and supplements. They see something on sale for joint pain, and they buy it. Then they see something for memory booster and they take THAT, never having any real idea that one of the ingredients in the joint pain counteracts with the memory booster and can cause heart or lung problems or whatever.

But "they" just kept bleating like sheep that:

1) REPUTABLE supplement stores will not sell ANYONE ANYTHING that counteracts with one another. OF course, how they (the supplement sellers) know what the people have at home is a great mystery. Also, how SUPPLEMENT SELLERS are the great educated is also unanswered, considering that Super Supplements here is always hiring and there is NO pre-requisite that one be well versed in homeopathy or naturopathy, herbs, or supplements to work there.

2) EDUCATED consumers ALWAYS have handy books on herbs and supplements and do hours and hours and years of research before buying ANYTHING. Ever.

3) It's really up to the pharmacist and MD to know that their patients are taking supplements and advising them to not take supplements that are harmful, even though no supplement has ever been proven to be harmful, and even though very few people even tell their MD's or pharmacists that they're taking supplements

4) this will never happen to me because my supplements are the purest of the pure. So there.

5) How do you KNOW!??!?!??! the heart and liver failure were due to supplements? THis person could have been on 102093840938092834 BIG PHARMA meds and THAT is what caused their organ failure. And no, they're not going to tell you that they were on these BIG PHARMA SHILL medications when you ask them because THEY KNOW!!!! you are a shill and you will kill them to prevent them from spreading the word that BIG PHARMA KILLS!!!!11

IT was a waste of time that turned into a flame war (numerous) as soon as it was posted. The fools there that lack the brain cells that are devoted to logic and rationality will find 10,000 reasons to argue that supplements ARE NOT TO BLAME. EVER. and I really don't feel like getting into that shit and having to defend the life of a dead girl that was seen as nothing but a walking wallet to these blood suckers. And these blood suckers (who sell the shit and who apologize for it on the internet) will also blame WESTERN MEDICINE for her death because she died IN A HOSPITAL. Hmm....think about THAT one.... :eyes:

[trotsky]

5. I can't argue because I know you are absolutely right.

Especially about the little twist - blaming "western med" because she actually died in a hospital. That's EXACTLY how those fuckers roll.

So sad - and she died for nothing. At least when pharmaceuticals take a life, that has to be documented and chalked up.

[semillama]

10. I can vouch firsthand for the supplement selling experience

I used to work at GNC right before I started grad school, back in the 90s. (For our non-North American skeptics, GNC is a chain of supplement stores) I had no training or knowledge of supplements before I started. We were expected to read the books and magazines on sale to educate ourselves. I found that the most actually informative magazine was Muscle Media, put out by EAS. They actually reference sports medicine journals and such.

You made commission on selling the store brand of the product. I recall several times that I lost that commission because I talked elderly people OUT of buying shark cartilage for their arthritis, because I had read about it and knew that the only thing that was a result of shark cartilage pills was lots of dead sharks. I probably wasn't the best salesman, since I tried not to bullshit people (at least, not bullshit them much - I have to admit I never discouraged people from buying other things, such as homeopathic remedies and the ever-popular cranberry diuretic drinks for the desperate drug-test-takers).

[TZ]

2. and yet, the supplement industry is a not out to make money

Oh nooo...its only the pharmas that want to make a profit. Its only the pharmas that sell poisons. Its only the pharmas that don't care about people just profit...:sarcasm:
God thats a sad story.

[Heddi]

4. Yes, and that's why all supplements are free

and the people who sell them make no salary, and any monies that are received go 100% to charity.

No, no money involved at all....

[onager]

6. Thanks.

I knew the woos would blame "Western medicine" because she died in a hospital.

Makes me ponder the fact that there are plenty of filthy-rich woos out there, including many who made their piles off of "natural" snake oil.

Since cold, rational conventional medicine has been such a miserable failure--do I really need a sarcasm smiley?--why don't they just fund their own hospitals?

To share costs, they could even go in with the Fundie Xians who believe in faith healing and disbelieve in evolution/science.

What a concept! The Hospital of Holy and Holistic Healing.

After about 20 years, we'd have a good database to track its success rate.

[Warpy]

7. Oh, gawd, I recognized that poor girl

because anybody who's been in hospital nursing long enough has met her.

If she's lucky, somebody gets her into the ER the second they notice her eyeballs have turned yellow. At that point, a portal shunt and lots of lactulose might just save what brain cells she still has. I took care of one like that from the tubes out of every orifice point until she was in rehab. When I first saw her, just touching her skin would leave a bruise. She got 32 units of blood, platelets and plasma within the first 24 hours. She had combined vitamin A megadoses with Tylenol and codeine.

You're right about those vitamin idiots. There is no ethical consideration and there is no knowledge base to back it up, just a bunch of sales people who read crap on the internet and go forth and sell as much of it as they can to people who are just a little too trusting.

When people tell me all natural is always better, I point out that shit, arsenic and asbestos are all natural and not particularly healthful.

[Heddi]

8. Warpy, she was getting so much lactulose

that the hospital ran out one weekend. We were giving it to her via NG Q2 hours and lactulose enemas Q2 hours. I think the lowest I ever saw her ammonia was around 500....

She developed gastric bleeding because of her lack of coagulation, so we gave her blood---massive amounts. Then she went into DIC, but was still hypovolemic. So she got FFP and crystalloids and platelets and more blood, and more crystalloids....

During her 3+ month stay, she went asystolic about 4 or 5 times.....Vtach and Vfib 3 or 4 times, Afib with RVR was her standing rhythm

Unfortunately, she was never a surgical candidate for anything more than getting a PEG tube placed because she would have died as soon as they gave her anesthesia---she had no way to filter it out. Kidneys were gone, and she only got moderate help through daily dialysis runs. Her liver was completely non-functional. If they did end up doing surgery on her, she would have bled out as soon as they made the first cut.

So it was lactulose and enemas and rectal foleys.

Oh....and she was mildly anuric b/c of the kidney failure, but if we didn't keep a foley in her she would have urinary retention and all of the wonderful symptoms that go along with that, so she had a foley in, but was getting awful UTI's---e.coli, MRSA, VRE, MSSA....we were giving her antibiotic bladder irrigation 24 hours a day just to keep the bacteria somewhat at bay.

Because of the antibiotics we were giving her, she had a total of about 4 PICCS and several central lines, not including the thousands of peripheral IV's. And she had a couple of temporary dialysis ports put in but all of these lines would have to be pulled every few weeks because they were growing gram neg rods, etc. So she'd get lines for 3 weeks, then go on a 2 week line holdiay to clear infection. Then more lines, more infection, more holiday.

She was a train-wreck from the get-go. On top of all of her physical symptoms, she had a fucked up childhood, to say the least, and was just a mess inside an out......

[mr blur]

9. Fuck. You live in the most scientifically advanced society ever on the planet

and bullshit and ignorance are seen as virtues. It's the same here - we have homeopathic hospitals funded by the health service!

What gets me about these supplements - the implication with a supplement is that you already have a balanced, sensible diet and lifestyle and that, for some reason, your body might be lacking in certain things and the supplement will make up the difference. However, most people eat processed crap and live on a chair in front of the TV and just shovel this garbage down because it makes them feel that they're looking after their bodies! And it's all "natural", so how can it hurt?

:banghead:

[progressoid]

11. Good god.

[onager]

12. I just went slumming in the Health forum.

Next year, I want a DU Valentine heart that says "FOAD, asswipe."

[Deep13]

13. Patent medicine.

Before modern, scientific pharmacuticals, con artists formulated and sold untested "treatments" with secret ingredients. And there was something for everything. The people at the Earthy-crunchy store should be tried for manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license.

[onager]

15. Big Snake Oil, Elvis, Hank Williams and other cultural crap.

The real Hank Williams (the first one) toured for a patent medicine named "Hadacol." The inventor said he came up with the name because "I hadda call it something."

Allegedly, Hadacol combined an alcohol base with a powerful laxative. Because the inventor believed a bowel movement was as good as sex. He may have been onto something there. Cough...

One of the investors/promoters/maybe-owners of Hadacol--the historical record is murky--was Col. Tom Parker, who would later mismanage Elvis Presley.

Both Elvis and Hank, of course, were enthusiastic users of personal, prescription-free medication.

At least Hadacol left a musical legacy of live performances by Hank Williams, performing in the "Hadacol Caravan" and available today on CD. Sometimes Hank invited his wife "Miss Audrey" up on stage. The great country music journalist Alanna Nash refers to Miss Audrey as "the Nashville Yoko Ono."

For a fascinating cinema-cultural look at snake oil, check out the classic 1957 movie "A Face In The Crowd." You should check it out anyway, Cultural Scold notes. It was one of the first movies to explore the nexus between politics, pop culture and slick advertising for useless products. The plot involves a snake-oil company owned by a retired far-right General who wants to get a Senator elected. With amazing performances from Andy Griffith, Patricial Neal, and a very young Walter Matthau.

[semillama]

17. Some of my favorite old-time patent medicines:

"Buckeye Pile Ointment"

"John Bull's King of Pain"

"Crook's Wine of Tar"

"Fenner's St. Vitus Dance Medicine"

"KKK Shampoo"

"Kilmer's Female Remedy"

"Mexican Mustang Liniment" (the 19th century Enzyte!)

"Reakirt's Breast Julap"

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

14. Did you see that "ephedra doesn't have ephedrine" woo?

That shit was hilarious.

[Heddi]

16. I don't know

I did see someone touting that they can properly administer ephederine under very strict dietary and other guidelines without any ill effects...that they know of....or are willing to admit...no, no effects at all. Here, want some fen-phen?

[Silent3]

18. It couldn't have been the "natural" stuff!

It had to be "toxins in the environment", you know, some evil unnatural man-made thing like mercury from a vaccine taken by someone your patient once touched, or preservatives from a Twinkie she mistakenly ate when she was 6, terrible artificial poisons that all of the natural remedies just weren't enough to combat!

:sarcasm: