Giving in to the Madness of Christmas

I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.

It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.

Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.

As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to give in to the madness of Christmas.

Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.

The unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.

On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags  detention camps that put Australia to shame, will now be our Minister for Social Services.

To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both in its substance and its timing.

Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another black teenager was shot by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and at least 24 killed, following massive flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.

There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch into alienation.

But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our society. In A Life at Work, Thomas Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.

Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience, the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years, and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that connection with past Christmases.

But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by Mongolian shamans.

This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.

Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of study could be established.

They might include an expansion of human psychology. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the mainstream psychiatric community.)

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus roll.

Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!

Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.

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Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 2

In my last entry I gave an update on my food intolerance and low blood sugar, and the sometimes contradictory diets that are out there to deal with these kinds of problems. 

This time I’m writing about the treatment that’s available – and why I don’t take advantage of it.

There’s a clinic in Melbourne’s outer east that orders faecal tests (too much information?) and then sells tailored probiotics depending on the results. I’ve wondered for years whether this was the optimum solution for me, and instinctively mistrusted the bog-standard (sorry) probiotics you see in health food stores.

And I’ve hated myself for not choosing the faecal test option, assuming the problem was self-defeating stinginess. But now that I know myself better, and can reflect on my experiences, I think I understand the reasons for my reluctance.

It boils down to this: the fact that mainstream medicine has so few answers leads to another problem -- beware the ones who do.

Beware them because they can see the miles-long queue and they have prepared for it. Their doctors are in demand and very important! They have their neat little administrative systems and payment schedules you have to fit into, and you’d better fit in if you want help.

Not only that but they want to flog you all the supplements they recommend you take. There’s a conflict of interest right there: rather than being designed for you as a whole person – your budget, your condition, your needs – they will squeeze you into one of their categories so they can sell you the maximum amount and make big dollars.

And they charge like wounded bulls because they know their patients have few alternatives. Actually, it’s not just their fault that the out-of-pocket expenses are so outrageous. Medicare doesn’t cover the battery of tests they will order, or the extended consultations, or the supplements.

But these clinics then add insult to injury by charging for stuff like supplying medical records. There’s none of that old-fashioned genuine relationship between even the busy GPs and their patients. These clinics are money-making factories.

They’re like the psychiatrists who are obsessed with your symptoms but don’t give a flying fruitcake about you – the person.

There’s an irony in this situation. If you have obscure ailments that come and go you will search around for individualised treatment because mainstream doctors haven’t a clue about your dietary problems.

Then you find yourself within a depersonalised system that has already decided what’s wrong with you and what the remedies are before the doctor has even seen you.

This is not dissimilar to the way some specialists behave. I won’t go into details about the arrogance of a certain derm I used to see, but at least he was always very punctual – he had his own strict rules as well as imposing them on his patients.

I haven’t been to one of these allergy doctors for decades but I tried a few in my twenties and early thirties as well as naturopath–homeopaths and Chinese doctors. Over those years, I probably spent thousands on a cure. These days I have zilch faith in homeopathy and I am sure herbs help some conditions, but not mine.

I could afford to pay for the treatment in the allergy clinic in outer Melbourne. I just don’t want to take the risk. Yet I admit to myself that if I had unlimited money I would probably try it. It’s the fear of throwing away good money on yet another phoney cure that haunts me.

You might also like: Heroes and Villains: Food Intolerance, Hypoglycaemia Candida and the Failsafe Diet.

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Allergies, FODMAPs and Food Confusion – Part 1

Sometimes my whole karma seems to be about having conditions that are obscure, invisible, not recognised by mainstream medicine and difficult if not impossible to treat. I’ve never felt I fitted into the patient paradigm for any of my ills, and when I’ve tried to squeeze myself in, it hasn’t always worked – which isn’t to say I haven’t received some valuable advice over the years.

(It strikes me that one day I’ll die, and presumably of something recognisable by medical science! Now I have the image of a confused doctor trying to work out how I kicked the bucket.)

I have written in this blog before about my low blood sugar and food intolerance problem, and how it doesn’t fit into any of the definitions or recognised treatments. Actually these days that’s not quite true but treatment remains complicated. Let me walk you through it ...

I have functional hypoglycaemia, a condition that most doctors know little about despite the fact that it’s a precursor to diabetes. I’m so sensitive to carbohydrates that even brown rice makes me tired. Low blood sugar is often sheeted home to the overgrowth of a bacteria that lives in the gut, Candida albicans, leading to a syndrome known as ‘leaky gut’.

Mainstream medicine has never recognised Candida overgrowth or leaky gut as legitimate medical conditions. Another possible reason for hypoglycaemia is adrenal exhaustion, but mainstream medicine doesn’t recognise this either.

However, there are people who do – and they are mainly, in Melbourne at least, naturopaths. And one of the things they sell for adrenal exhaustion is bioidentical hormones. Some pharmacists sell them also. The one actual doctor I could find who flogs them in Melbourne had some truly appalling comments written about her standards of service on a doctor review website.

Apparently it is a loophole in the law that allows the unregulated sale of these hormones, which can actually raise levels of the hormone in the blood to dangerous heights – this article was enough to put me off (it's eight years old but the situation appears to be unchanged). So I crossed that possible treatment off my list.

It’s a bit rich for mainstream medicine to complain about underqualified practitioners flogging unregulated substances when it has shown itself thoroughly uninterested in conditions such as LBS and glandular problems that don’t appear on standard blood tests.

A swag of fairly recent diets – all very distinctive and contradicting each other – do provide some help.

The Failsafe diet is designed for those with sensitivities to common chemicals found in foods, especially salicylates and amines. It’s been particularly useful for conditions such as ADD and poor behaviour and school performance in children. It recognises that additional intolerances, such as sensitivity to gluten, fructose and lactose, may also exist. 

Unfortunately this diet refuses to believe that Candida and related sugar sensitivity exist – so if a kid reacts to soft drink, it’s always just the dodgy food colouring and never the sugar. I just don’t believe that’s true for every single kid (and certainly not for me). I’ve written about this elsewhere.

Then there’s the notorious paleo diet. Truth to tell I hadn’t been thinking about that much lately until I watched a program that talked about how harmful high-carb diets were for those with diabetes – even if they were supposedly ‘good carbs’. Protein is good for low blood sugar also, and I do need to eat more – just not from cows or sheep.

Finally there is the FODMAPs diet. This is a mainstream diet that has scientific legitimacy, designed for those with irritable bowel syndrome. The premise is that some foods contain a collection of molecules (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols) – no wonder they abbreviated it to FODMAPs – that some people can’t digest. They ferment in the bowel after being guzzled by the resident bacteria.

it basically boils down to fructose and fructans, galactans, lactose, and sugar alcohols like sorbitol. These carbs are found in a large number of fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains and other foods. The actual diet is highly tailored to each individual and should be devised in consultation with a dietician. It starts with a strict elimination diet followed by slowly introducing food types into the diet to test them out.

Interestingly, this may solve a mystery that has hovered around allergy medicine for years – why some folk claim to be intolerant of gluten even though they don’t have coeliac disease. Wheat and rye products contain fructans, one of the FODMAPs carbohydrates.

At first blush FODMAPs looks similar to the anti-Candida diet. In fact it’s anything but. You can apparently eat sucrose – white sugar – on FODMAPs, an absolute no-no for low blood sugar and Candida. Traditional sour dough is okay on FODMAPs too as long as the grain is allowed, while any sort of fermentation is out in the Candida diet. And hard cheeses are better than soft cheeses on FODMAPs because the former contain less lactose – the only allowed cheese in the Candida diet is cottage.

FODMAPs also contradicts the Failsafe diet with its list of allowed vegetables – there is some overlap but also many differences between it and the list of low-salicylate vegetables.

Confusing huh?

Next week: my options for better health, and why I don't take them up.

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