10:22 a.m. - 2003-06-14
Organic Milk
I realise I haven't been updating much lately, and when I do write I haven't been very entertaining. I haven't wanted to talk about it much, but it's because I'm having a flair up of my lupus. It's my first rather serious flair in many years, and I'm just a tad freaked out.
Not to mention cranky. Did you know that the main symptom of lupus is crankiness? Uh, well, at least for me it is.
I probably wouldn't even bring this up except Bruce had a weird realization last night that kind of spooked me. I had spent much of the day on the internet looking for holistic treatments for lupus, since I long ago gave up on western medicine. What doctors have to offer me has, in the past, only exacerbated the problem. And besides, if I wanted to overdose on steroid treatments, I would have become an athlete. There must be some other way!
So I was reading all kinds of wacky stuff, some of it obvious quackery, and some of it seemingly rational. I picked out a few of the more rational pages and book marked them so Bruce could give me the scientific analysis when he got home. One more wonderful thing about being married to a man who knows his metabolic regulator chemistry -- you can always get the "Quack or Fact" analysis of any too-good-to-be-true New Age treatment.
When he got home I pointed him towards one of the sites that was highly technical, yet somewhat grammatically screwed. Bruce read for awhile, his brow furrowed. "The guy can't write, but he seems to have some interesting points. Especially about the digestive enzymes. We might want to try that."
"Yeah, but the part about the Bovine Growth Hormone weirded me out." The author had also theorized that people with lupus have trouble making growth hormones, and therefore the Bovine Growth Hormone in commercial milk was beneficial for them. "I just don't see that BGH is good for anyone."
Bruce looked at me and got a very strange and somewhat horrified look on his face. "Hey, when did this flair up start?" he asked.
"Two weeks ago."
"And what did we do three weeks ago?"
I thought for a minute. "I don't know."
"We switched to non-commercial milk. We went over completely to organic milk with no BGH. And a week later, you started getting symptoms."
My jaw dropped. It was true. Three weeks ago I had a fit about mistreatment of cows on farms and all the antibiotics, etc, in commercial milk, and declared that our sporadic use of organic milk should become a steady deal. It was just about a week later that I started getting rashes and running a constant 101 degree temperature. A few days later I had all the numerous infections and aching joints that I know so well.
Creepy, huh? Your food is full of weird stuff, folks. I'm here to testify.
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