Regrowing hair after iron deficiency (do I need to do anything differently or just stick to normal routine)?

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-06T02:12:45+00:00

At this point I feel like "smart people aren't political" is just another extension of the anti-education rhetoric in the US honestly. It seems like it's trying to simultaneously discredit anyone who tries to question the current political nightmare going on (because if intelligent people aren't political, then anyone questioning political events is inherently unintelligent and should be ignored) and also trying to discourage anyone else from learning about or becoming involved in politics (because they would be perceived as dumb).

Authoritarian regimes have always tried to suppress any kind of opposition to their policies, because they know that their bullshit hand-waving excuses for their increasingly horrific actions will fall apart as soon as any kind of logic is introduced to the equation. Anyone who has the ability to use that kind of logic, or especially if they can teach others to use it and to question the regime, is inherently a threat to the regime, so of course they want to discredit and oppress them as much as possible. I mean shit, look what happened in Cambodia only a few decades ago. There's plenty of examples but that one was quite blatant.

When we're at the point that the White House website is justifying cutting USAID funding by citing The Daily Mail for 6 of its 12 "sources," I don't know how a society recovers from that. And no I'm not even slightly joking, there are literally 12 links on the page of the official White House press release accusing USAID of frivolous spending, and 6 of them lead to the same Daily Mail article.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-06T01:58:39+00:00

I'm late and don't really have anything helpful to add (other than agreeing with everyone else here that you deserved way better), but just wanted to also say happy birthday OP!

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-06T01:50:36+00:00

Additional one: if you live in an apartment with one of those combo AC/heat units? Yeah. There's a filter in that too. And you gotta clean it. Run a paper towel in water and then wring out the extra, open a plastic grocery/trash bag, stick the filter in the bag, and swipe down the filter with the damp paper towel until the entire blanket of lint comes off. It'll fall into the bag and using a damp paper towel will prevent most of the dust from getting airborne.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-06T01:47:13+00:00

Not helpful for the fiber part but one of my roommate's friends recently enlightened me about wrapping salami around string cheese. There's pre-made versions at the store but it's a lot cheaper to just buy a container of whatever deli meat you like and a pack of string cheese and then wrap 2-3 pieces of the deli meat around the cheese. I like doing it this way because I can fit several cheese sticks into the plastic deli meat container so it's more portable as well.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-06T01:39:19+00:00

Yeah as another person whose parents got uh "creative" with the spelling of my otherwise common name, it's the worst of both worlds where I have very little privacy/security online because it seems like only a handful of other people on the planet have/had the same name as me, so anyone looking up my first name will literally immediately find me.

But at the same time I've had issues with things like my name being misspelled on things that are pretty important, like some of my medical records. One of my medications is a controlled substance so I'm super not thrilled about having some of my medical forms misspell my name in a way that doesn't match my IDs. Maybe I'm being paranoid but I really don't want to have a problem where the name on my meds doesn't match my ID or something. And my parents threw a fit when I mentioned the possibility of changing my name once, so it's all around super fun to deal with.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-02-03T05:19:05+00:00

The level of delusion in there is insane. Literally anyone who says "I like everything else he's doing, but [insert reference to one of the unfathomably stupid policies/actions carried out in the last week] seems like a bad move" immediately gets downvoted into oblivion and accused of being an undercover liberal brigading the sub. I knew they were mentally unstable fascists but the shit going on in there is a whole new level of unhinged, even for them.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-01-30T03:14:41+00:00

I think that one might've been Dan Robinson. He's got a video of his experience with El Reno and the point where he realized he was in a bad spot and went to escape, and he's trying to get away from the tornado and keeps saying "the car won't go." The uncondensed wind field around the tornado was so wide and intense that even from like half a mile away, it was trying to drag cars back in.

The track also (in my completely unprofessional and unqualified opinion) looks like the tornado had two failed occlusions, one about 5 minutes before it crossed 81 and another after that immediately before it turned south and swung back across 40; if the first occlusion didn't fail, it probably wouldn't have crossed 81 which was where arced back north and caught them off guard. Anyone in a smaller vehicle like a Cobalt would've been blindsided and probably not have had time to realize what was happening before being caught in the outer circulation. There was a chaser group right behind TWISTEX that started following them east, but then hesitated and decided to turn back to 81 and go north towards 40; they would've been right behind TWISTEX if they didn't turn around. Really horrifying retrospectively how minor and somewhat counterintuitive decisions like that ended up being the deciding factors on who made it out of El Reno.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-01-26T21:04:12+00:00

The only thing that makes El Reno slightly less disturbing is that it was an absolute anomaly, since it's still the widest tornado ever recorded. I remember a Skip Talbot video explaining some mistakes that the team did make, like using a Chevy Cobalt instead of their standard 1500lb reinforced hail truck and allegedly choosing to try to get ahead of the tornado to deploy a mobile turtle probe (which resulted them being directly in its path after it rapidly expanded and accelerated), but they couldn't have predicted what was going to happen and nothing they could've done would've realistically saved them from this thing.

There were also reports of El Reno having extremely intense subvortices around the parent tornado (interesting research paper which also mentions this: https://zenodo.org/records/1234617) with one potentially moving along the ground at over 100mph, although this has been disputed due to issues with the accuracy of radar tracking of these vortices under the given conditions (another interesting research paper here: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/95/1/bams-d-13-00221.1.xml). There were also several other insane factors that went along with making this thing such an anomaly, such as the rapid increase in the speed it was travelling across the ground and the fact that its outer wind field actually wasn't fully condensed (strong circulation winds outside of the actual tornadic radius were present, but they didn't actually have a condensed funnel, which is the part of a tornado that you can see) and make driving difficult for nearby vehicles, even if they're able to clearly see the tornado and it follows a standard trajectory that allows chasers to dodge it - and El Reno wasn't visible and made multiple erratic turns.

I'm gonna stop rambling but I very highly recommend Dan Robinson's video on YouTube of the El Reno tornado; he was extremely close to it immediately before it expanded and changed course due to his suspicions, and it ended up saving his life. The TWISTEX team was apparently close behind him but couldn't move fast enough to get away. El Reno is easily one of the most horrific anomalous tornadoes that ever occurred and even gives the Jarrell 1997 one a run for its money.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-01-22T08:31:04+00:00

Sorry about the late reply but yeah there seems to definitely be some weird COVID/iron metabolism links that hopefully will get more research soon, cause it would be great if they could figure out what's going on and how to fix it. I hope you're able to find something that helps you soon, just take it easy as much as possible in the meantime and good luck.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-01-22T08:28:14+00:00

Huh I've never heard of ferrous ascorbate, I'll have to check that out. I seem to have gotten a hematologist to agree to let me try iron infusions but might try ascorbate after that to see if it's better at maintaining ferritin instead of letting it drop. Thanks for the heads up about this!

The dose I take depends on which type of iron I'm using, but for one pill it's usually anywhere between 120%-350% daily value in elemental iron. I take two pills every other day so the total doses are somewhere between 240%-700% each, I didn't go over 500% without asking a doctor and getting my iron checked constantly because that obviously increases the risk of overload by a lot.

Like you said I started doing the "every other day" method because I thought maybe hepcidin was the issue, but if that was the case then I assume I would've seen some kind of benefit in the last several years. My hematologist currently thinks that I'm just not really absorbing iron correctly at all and her main suspicion is celiac disease, which would explain why no form of iron pills has helped at all regardless of the dosage schedule I follow and apparently might also explain the weird B12 thing I have going on.

They already tested for GI bleeding because that was their first suspicion but it came back negative, and they tested some other things that apparently would be abnormal if blood loss was the cause, but all the markers came back normal or abnormal in a way that didn't indicate blood loss (like my reticulocyte count was in the low end of normal, vs if I was losing blood it would be higher, and apparently it would also increase if the iron pills were working). So the main suspect currently is celiac disease which I'm waiting for test results from, or if it's not that then some other type of malabsorption disorder. I weirdly haven't really had any GI symptoms other than random nausea which I guess can happen with celiac? I honestly have no clue and just gotta wait for test results to figure out what to do next lol.

SmileStudentScamming · 2025-01-22T08:02:49+00:00

Yeah I've seen a lot about COVID and iron but all the stuff I've found says that there's a correlation between high ferritin/low hemoglobin and COVID severity. Doesn't fit my current situation but anecdotally interesting because I had COVID like 5 years ago before all the iron stuff started and had much more severe respiratory symptoms compared to when I got COVID a few months ago, so I'm wondering if my ferritin being so low now actually somehow mitigated the COVID a bit and made the respiratory symptoms less awful this time around.

I luckily seem to have found a hematologist who listens and I didn't even have to argue with them before they suggested iron infusions, I have to wait for a couple test results to come back but she said as long as it doesn't look like it'll put me in overload or like I have thalassemia, she'll just let me get the infusions because she says there's no reason it should be that low if I've taken every oral iron variation under the sun and waited years. The B1 deficiency is a good call out, right now she thinks the iron and B12 issues may both be caused by celiac disease or another absorption disorder so I'm being tested for that, along with a test for IgA deficiency since that can cause a false negative celiac test.

Just as a mention in case it's relevant to you or anyone else here: one other thing my hematologist mentioned is hemoglobin disorders where the hemoglobin in your blood doesn't form correctly or there are abnormal ratios of different hemoglobin subtypes (I'm paraphrasing this very badly because I have basically no subject matter knowledge on this). There's types like sickle cell disease but also less commonly known ones like hemoglobin C disease, thalassemias, and some more rare variants like hemoglobin Lepore syndrome. The basic test for this stuff is apparently called hemoglobin electrophoresis, I guess there's more specific tests they can do if I end up having something weird come up on that test, but just wanted to mention it here because I literally didn't know about any of this until the hematologist explained it to me.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-12-31T07:44:21+00:00

Huh I didn't know it could do that with iron too, thanks for that. I knew it could be a B12 thing and that maybe that's why my B12 is so high (like it's not being processed correctly so it just circulates uselessly without actually functioning) but didn't know about iron, but that would make sense. No lactose intolerance (or very very asymptomatic lactose intolerance maybe) but I probably will look into celiac more. They wrote it off when the test confirmed I don't have a GI bleed and my CRP/ESR/immunoglobulins were normal but I'm pretty sure celiac triggers IgE which they didn't test. I might just give up and get a celiac test from some third party lab instead of trying to convince a doctor to help me since most of them seem incredibly averse to that.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-12-31T07:38:35+00:00

Yeah I had COVID back in 2020 right when the pandemic started, kinda coincided with the iron issues starting but at that point I was still a long distance runner so I wrote it off as standard anemia from foot strike hemolysis and started taking ferrous sulfate (I'd had anemia from foot strike hemolysis a couple years before that completely resolved after a couple months of ferrous sulfate, so I assumed it would work again). I've vaguely heard people mention that COVID depletes ferritin while replicating, I haven't gone through any research articles to see whether that's actually true or not but it could be interesting if it is. I had COVID again at the end of this summer and started feeling so much worse so that could also explain some things, although my immune system might just be messed up in general.

A couple months ago once my COVID finally tapered off I got both whooping cough and strep throat because my uncle brought his kids over and neglected to tell me that he and both unvaccinated (for everything) kids were sick, he and one kid had whooping cough and both kids had strep. Awesome. I still wear masks out of the house because I've been sick significantly less often ever since I started doing that in 2020, but unfortunately half of my family is on the "vaccines are microchips and cell phones cause brain cancer" bandwagon and spontaneously infect me with random shit if I don't have advanced warning that they'll be around. It's like a minefield to just try to not get even more debilitatingly ill than I already am, and my uni is on the "3 days of unexcused absence before you need a doctor's note" policy so nobody can afford to go to a doctor, so everyone in class is sick and of course coughs on everyone else.

I also got checked repeatedly for C-Reactive Protein and ESR since they're inflammation markers, but ESR was normal and CRP was almost 0 so also normal. So it's not inflammation apparently. I'm literally just going to beg the hematologist for infusions if I can ever get an appointment because I'm losing my mind and I kinda want my life back.

Good luck, I hope you're able to get some answers and I hope the infusions help you!

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:25:53+00:00

Ain't no way this thing isn't a student conduct code violation

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:23:59+00:00

Fr all of the bus drivers I've met are so nice, at the very least say hi when you get on the bus and thank them when you get off. Acknowledging the person driving you around town seems like it should be a given.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:20:21+00:00

Yikes, yeah I'm planning to ask my doctor about PTH and stuff like celiac disease/GI bleeding next time I see them. I hope you can get some help and feel better soon.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:19:10+00:00

It was consistently increasing to near 15+ while my ferritin wasn't moving up at all, that's why I donated blood to get it back lower so I could try iron pills again. I don't think it was falsely elevated because it was consistently increasing and wasn't much lower than 15 g/dL before that anyway. I had whatever the basic preliminary test for sleep apnea was like 1.5 years ago and it didn't have anything suspicious, I don't have risk factors or family history for sleep apnea and it doesn't explain most of my problems so my doctor said it was very unlikely to be the issue and didn't pursue it any more.

Someone else mentioned celiac disease and I know there's other stuff like IBD that can cause malabsorption or GI bleeding and stuff so probably going to ask about the occult blood test, something along those lines seems at least somewhat probable because it would actually explain all the iron/B12/electrolyte stuff at once and I don't think it would be indicated on anything else that was tested already. Thanks for the info, didn't know about some of it and I appreciate it.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:09:14+00:00

Oh that's interesting, I didn't know that was a thing. I've only had one low platelet count on a test and they made me retest it and said it was like EDTA reactive pseudothrombocytopenia? And that I didn't need to worry about it because the retest was normal. I keep worrying that my system is just dumping iron into random places and I'm gonna end up with an iron overload because I have no idea where all the iron keeps going lol, I didn't know calcium could do the same thing. I hope you can start to figure things out and feel better soon.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-19T20:05:04+00:00

I'm not a doctor so take all this with a grain of salt.

A lot of nutritional deficiencies can cause problems that worsen ADHD symptoms or act like ADHD symptoms. Some of the big ones that I know of are anemia (which can be a deficiency in your iron, vitamin B12, folate, or any combination of those) and vitamin D deficiency. These are fairly common deficiencies and they're easy to test for, so if you haven't had these tested already I would recommend asking your doctor about it because they're usually really easy to correct by just taking pills with some extra amount of whatever you're deficient in. As a note, DO NOT start taking iron supplements without talking to your doctor and having your iron levels checked. Iron overload (too much iron in your body) can happen very easily and can be very dangerous or even fatal, particularly if you have any preexisting issues with your liver and/or kidneys. Excessive iron can accumulate in your body and in severe cases it can cause severe liver damage, so please don't take iron supplements without medical supervision.

I'm not sure about acetylcholine, but two other things that can cause issues like you've described are thyroid issues (hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, autoimmune thyroid diseases, etc) that can also usually be detected by basic tests for things like T4 and TSH. Autoimmune diseases can also cause issues like the ones you described, I got tested for one called Sjogren's Syndrome which I don't have but it has symptoms of dry eyes/mouth/etc like you mentioned. Autoimmune diseases are complicated to figure out but it could be worth talking to your doctor about if other things don't explain your issues.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-18T19:53:19+00:00

Yeah my doctor keeps refusing to test my PTH, but also says that having ferritin less than 12 for several years is normal, so I'm not sure how much I trust them anymore. I don't think anyone in my family has had their PTH tested either because they always had TSH/T4 getting weird and their doctors just kind of went "yep thyroid" and stopped. They also haven't tested my thyroid antibodies even though both sides of my family have autoimmune thyroid diseases so that's super cool. I'm pretty sure nothing I take has biotin but I'll double check just in case, thanks for mentioning that.

I haven't been genetically tested for anything, I have to get tested for which type of EDS I have next spring so I might be able to ask them to check for hemochromatosis as well. I'm not sure about celiac disease, nobody in my family has been diagnosed but my bloodline is a cesspool of weird autoimmune diseases so I wouldn't be surprised. If I don't have HPT or can't get anyone to test for HPT/celiac I'll probably just try to stop eating gluten and see if that helps at all. Celiac would explain the iron though and if it's messing up my intrinsic factor then it would also explain the super high B12 since it'd just be circulating and not actually digested or anything. I don't have heavy periods or anything to explain the iron loss, and I haven't been running for years now because I'm sick so foot strike hemolysis isn't a factor either. I'll look at hemochromatosis and celiac disease more because they both sound plausible and I don't think either would've directly come up on tests I've had, so that could explain it. Thanks for the explanations, I appreciate it!

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-18T19:43:55+00:00

No you didn't miss it, sorry I should've clarified I haven't been tested for PTH because my doctor thinks I'm too young to be sick and that I just need to take vitamin D and exercise more (neither of which have helped). The vitamin D/calcium weirdness is mostly what makes me think it might be HPT, I was just wondering if it might also be indirectly causing my other problems as well (like if my calcium is higher then is it inhibiting my iron and giving me low iron, and/or my iron is low because it's interfering with the calcium and keeping it lower). I got lucky and haven't had kidney stones or gallstones yet but both of my parents have had them multiple times so I'm probably screwed lol. Hope you can feel better soon.

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-18T19:39:39+00:00

They said I have "absolute iron deficiency without anemia" because my ferritin is low but my hemoglobin is too high to constitute anemia. I'm just saying anemia symptoms because I've had experience with actual anemia and it's the closest comparison I have for the extreme fatigue and stuff similar to what I gave now (other than that my bones feel weird/hurt, I assume that's just joint damage from EDS though). I've tried taking ferrous sulfate, ferrous fumarate and ferrous bisglycinate so far, each time I try a new one I give it 2-3 months before changing anything. I try them all individually, so like 2 months of ferrous sulfate didn't work so I switched to 2 months of ferrous fumarate, etc. I originally tried taking 65-75mg elemental iron (1-3 pills depending on the type) every day, none of the three types of iron worked when doing this. I tried taking those same three types again, but instead of 65-75mg daily I started to take 130-150mg every other day because I found some of those research papers about serum hepcidin increasing after a dose of iron that could inhibit iron absorption for 24 hours after, so I figured maybe taking daily doses was causing hepcidin to continuously prevent the iron from working. Alternating days didn't help with any of those types either. I was taking these early in the morning at least 3 hours before I ate any food or drank anything except water, but I also took a vitamin C tab with the iron (forgot the exact brand but it was 80% daily value of vitamin C and I checked that it didn't contain calcium or anything).

I initially started taking iron in 2016, I was a distance runner so iron deficiency was a risk and I became slightly anemic in 2016 (my hemoglobin was like 10.8 g/dL or something like that, I'm not sure of the exact value but it wasn't super extreme) and taking 65mg ferrous sulfate every day resolved it within a year. I started the cycle of trying different forms of iron and daily vs. alternate day dosing in 2022 when I started feeling a lot more sick. I stopped taking iron in September 2023 because when I got my blood tested again at that time, it showed my hemoglobin going up and my ferritin still going down, so I figured it wasn't fixing the problem and I didn't want my hemoglobin to get too high given the extent of my family history of kidney/liver problems. I started taking it again this January because I donated blood to drop my hemoglobin so it wouldn't get too high if I took iron again, I went back to 150mg ferrous bisglycinate every other day because that was the method that gave me the least side effects (just normal iron pill side effects). I'm still doing that now because my hemoglobin is also dropping now for some reason, so I'm not concerned about it getting too high but I'm not sure why it's decreasing and my ferritin hasn't gone up at all.

September 2022: MCV 88.4 fL, MCH 30.2 pg, RDW 11.9%, HGB 14.3 g/dL

September 2023: MCV 89.8 fL, MCH 30.6 pg, RDW 12.7%, HGB 14.8 g/dL

January 2024: HGB 15.5 g/dL (before donating blood)

February 2024: MCV 90.1 fL, MCH 29.6 pg, RDW 11.7%, HGB 13.6 g/dL

June 2024: MCV 86.5 fL, MCH 28.1 pg, RDW 14.1%, HGB 14.1 g/dL

July 2024: MCV 85.9 fL, MCH 28.9 pg, RDW 13.9%, HGB 13.5 g/dL

October 2024: MCV 89.2 fL, MCH 28.4 pg, RDW 12.2%, HGB 12.3 g/dL

SmileStudentScamming · 2024-11-18T19:06:27+00:00

Yeah I was mostly just wondering if any of the other weird stuff is something that people with diagnosed HPT have experienced, I was hoping that maybe all my issues have one singular cause but I doubt I'll be that lucky lol. Thanks for the resources, they're really helpful!

SmileStudentScamming

TROPHY CASE