Sunlight

Just back from a holiday with a bit too much sun.
I wasn't sunbathing at all I can assure you - I try to cover my skin and wear medically effective sunglasses to block all types of lightwaves. The glasses are to protect my extremely light sensitive eyes, which produce one of the seven forms of vitamin D in the body resulting in big swings in my condition.

As I am generally physically better after more than a year on my personalised drug treatment (hooray!), I was trying to be more active and sociable with my family on holiday. Unfortunately the kickback from the excess of sun has knocked me for six. Back to trying to have a normal life while keeping myself away from too much UV light (which also includes some fluorescent lights).

Has anyone else noticed an increase in pains or depression or other physical changes about one or two days after getting an excess of sunshine - maybe by the sea with the extra reflections from the water? Sometimes the sunlight and changeable weather at the turn of the seasons have a similar effect.

The unbearable present

Last night I enjoyed being with about thirty five others in an evening of contemplation and meditation.
Many people present had never tried this approach to life - which is quite counter-cultural for Britain - and some helpful suggestions were offered for people who want to start.
One point made was that we have to try it for just a few minutes to begin with - we may very quickly struggle with things like pins-and-needles distracting us, or our mind being bombarded with thoughts, or we may simply be unable to sit still like that without feeling emotionally or physically uncomfortable with the situation.

The advice was to practice (in a way we individually find suitable) and persist, slowly increasing the amount of time we stay in contemplation.
We were advised to surrender to the difficult things that arise and then let them float past, allowing ourselves to be who we have been created to be, not who our hyperactive minds often tell us we must be.

Surrendering to the present moment, and persisting in spite of the surrounding thoughts and circumstances are two important principles to consider when you have a chronic illness. This is something I have learned spiritually and physically over the last few years.

We all have certain levels of long term pain that we feel we can (or can't) deal with - our memories of pain from the past can be one factor in how we respond. And sometimes it is the associated mental or emotional pain involved in living with chronic conditions that can be the hardest.
I have found that accepting the present moment, through meditation, can help me more than if I mentally fight back or try to cover over the physical pain (don't get me wrong; I do need some painkillers!).
Unfortunately in Europe and America we often have a very modern Westernised Christian approach to pain as soon as it appears - O God, please take it away! While there will always need to be some medications for serious pain, our heart's desire seems to be to rid ourselves of all painful aspects of life.

Well - in the famous opening words of M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Travelled: "Life is difficult". Surrendering to that fact is hard, especially when the pain is really bad. But surrendering is necessary. It may make it a tiny bit easier if we believe we are surrendering to a loving creator (but not always. The individual will is strong!).

Whether we are dealing with a sudden overwhelming cough or itch in the middle of meditating, or with severe pain levels in a bad flare up of our condition, persistence is also necessary. We have to choose to continue.

My experience is that things can become totally unbearable, worsening to a point we feel we simply cannot live with. But when that moment has passed, without intervening, then a time follows fairly soon afterwards. Our spirit breathes a sigh of relief. We are still alive. We have passed through it. And if we have persisted once, then we realise the gracious possibility that we could do so again.

These are only a few words on a tough issue - I don't believe that dealing with pain involves some trite thoughts popularised as "mind over matter". On the contrary, this is just the "tip of the iceberg" of our being - our whole bodies, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical, in all their wonderfully complex physiological detail.

Pain and one tiny unscientific conclusion

I just had to respond to Lynne McTaggart's What Doctors Don't Tell you blog on pain: this was the comment I posted.

Was very interested to read this timely posting on an important issue for patients as I agreed with 95 per cent of all you said.....until you made the comment about vitamin D. It is a very fashionable conclusion. But who benefits if everyone (apparently) needs to supplement their vit D intake? The health supplement producers, and particularly a large lobby of vit D producers, that's who.

If vitamins are defined as chemical substances that the body cannot produce itself but which must be ingested for correct functioning of the body, then why is vitamin D produced by the body (in several complex forms) through the action of light on skin and eyes? Maybe because it is not a vitamin and needs detailed investigation?

Many research studies recently have concluded there is a link (or correlation) between low levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (the most commonly and simply measured form of vit D) and pain/underlying disease. But note the word 'correlation'. The cause meanwhile could be one of at least two options: pain/underlying disease causes low levels of vit D; or low levels of vit D cause pain/disease. Too often it is claimed that a proven correlation has the latter cause. I am not just unconvinced but find this repeated mistaken conclusion totally unscientific.

Also, how come this study below (and others) showed that people with long-term avoidance of light still maintain normal vit D levels in their bodies?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9418761

Herpes - not so simple(x)?

Reading the latest Private Eye magazine column by M.D. (the comedian doctor Phil Hammond) on herpes simplex outbreaks has provoked bemusement.
I think M.D., despite his new role as patron of the Herpes Viruses Association, may have shown a disservice to the many people with cold sores or genital blisters as he wittered on about how, back in the olden days, people would panic unnecessarily about the herpes family of viruses being linked to a sexually transmitted disease.
He declaimed those who made a stigma out of the virus: 'Herpes does far more psychological damage than physical.' Then, continuing on his juicy theme, he helpfully put down transmission and cause of facial cold sores to...oral sex.
So much for trying to get rid of the stigma!
The HVA website is clear that, while all mucous membranes are particularly vulnerable, the virus can be passed through any skin to skin contact with friction, including via the hands. White lesions on the hands, caused by herpes simplex, are called whitlows.
Amid normal day-to-day conversation I have encountered no one of my generation or younger embarrassed to talk of obvious cold sores on their faces or of the known cause - herpes.
M.D.'s cheerful obsession with sexual transmission of herpes seems to say more about the stage of life reached by his (male) generation.
M.D. concludes of genital sores: 'They're only cold sores and they go away without treatment.' Really?
Other physicians in the US and elsewhere accept that a notable proportion of people continue to have chronic outbreaks of herpes simplex. A common suggestion is that it results from underlying suppression of the immune system.
Information on the HVA website tells us that 'three quarters of people with herpes simplex are unaware of it' and that the virus can cause - or the diagnosis be confused with - thrush, repeated cystitis-like symptoms, skin lesions on the buttocks, piles, lower back pain, nerve pain, flu symptoms and more.
Research worldwide has found herpes simplex (plus other viruses and bacterial infections) in patients with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.There are also several studies that have found herpes simplex surrounding plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients; findings which require further investigation.
Anyone with unexplained nerve pain at the neck, or persistent muscle pains might like to know these facts. Not that I am putting such conditions down to herpes - I don't give simplistic answers like M.D.
At the HVA's AGM the genitourinary specialist Dr George Kinghorn explained that the relationship between Type 1 (symptoms from the neck up) and Type 2 (from the waist down) of the virus is much less clear cut than previously thought. And he notes that symptoms and severity 'will also depend on a variety of individual susceptibility factors, our genetic make-up certainly has an effect'.
Inherited genetic factors could be one area of further study. So too could the genetic damage caused to human cells by forms of persistent bacteria like streptococcus and E.coli, which molecular scientists are now revealing to be much cleverer at changing their surrounding human environment than we first believed.
Investigation is needed in to what, I think, is a complex rather than a simplex subject.