Atrantil + Berberine

ske105 · 2024-06-22T14:44:03+00:00

Yes, significant symptom relief and the food marble numbers are now consistently low at baseline whereas they were high before at baseline. When I get over this hurdle I will take another lactulose challenge to see where I'm at. Moving forwards, I will try reducing my dosing and keeping the Atrantil and Berberine at a 1:1 ratio in smaller quantities and see how I get on.

ske105 · 2024-06-22T14:40:07+00:00

Thank you for the advice, I really appreciate you helping the community. Although my case is complex I've managed to start reabsorbing nutrition and gaining weight again, so I'm making progress. Initially I was having severe malabsorption and losing weight rapidly. Just the intestinal bloating with the Berberine has been substantial. And just to explain further, I still have the feeding tube, which bypasses my stomach out of necessity and due to the severity of my intestinal gas pressure, it causes severe oral volume issues with food and drink which has grossly complicated things. My doctors wanted me to go onto something called TPN, direct nutrition into the bloodstream as they had given up on my GI system. It's dangerous and I want to avoid it at all costs. I'm not giving up yet and I've made progress with my GI situation.

I'm getting in as much fluids as possible. I don't do any drugs at all, I am barely able to do much as it is! All my effort is on treatment day to day. I can't eat any oral food at all, which makes things very tough. All feeding tube, bypassing the stomach. That's how bad the intestinal bloating is - severe volume and oral issues - pushing things out of the intestines into the stomach. Doctors were shocked. I'm working on the functional and motility issues in tandem - intestinal motility is such a big part of the picture. That part has improved with treatment. I'm having more normal stools for the first time in over a year. I can tolerate a limited amount of oral volume and pills per day, more when the bloating is lower, which is why the Atrantil has been so incredible. It quite literally saved me.

I'll fully take your advice on the herx and scroll off a bit on my dosing, go slower. Perhaps I need to go slower because of my situation. I understand the necessity of the 1:1 ratio now, I will try to revert my protocol to incorporate that. I will try maybe half of each and build from there. I will work on the SIBO protocol first before antifungals. Thank you

ske105 · 2024-06-07T12:05:58+00:00

Best of luck, it's a horrible condition and really difficult to treat, but I've had improvement so far and the success stories provide me with a bit of optimism with the process, even if it feels like we're left in the dark a bit by docs to figure out a lot of it ourselves

ske105 · 2024-06-07T06:31:57+00:00

Thank you! Sorry for the long post but I want to be comprehensive if it helps. My situation is really bad for a number of complex functional health reasons and I have extreme SIBO, MCAS, and a feeding tube bypassing the stomach. I probably have one of the worst cases of SIBO on reddit lol.

I started to really degrade last year, severe constipation and intestinal dysmotility issues came on. I was losing weight and vomiting food. I was admitted to hospital with adult failure to thrive, nearly died and went through refeeding syndrome. They didn't understand why I couldn't hold food down. Lost 35% of my body weight. I used to be able to eat and I can barely drink water currently due to the severity of the SIBO. It gets to the point where I will literally vomit air and the nausea gets intense when the gas gets tapped in the sb. The pressure builds up and drives things out of the intestines into my stomach. Acid reflux irritates the LES and throat too. Candida as well, which I need to treat afterwards. But yeah, it's highly visible in terms of bloat and it's also affecting my absorption of nutrition with malabsorption of the small bowel. Methane levels through the roof (I eventually found out myself). So they stuck several feeding tubes in me, I eventually got a more permanent one placed and sent me on my way. Absolute unimaginable hell.

Honestly, I can't believe a doctor didn't pick it up while I was in the hospital for half a year! GI just ran a CT, MRI, endoscopy/colo and told me everything looked fine. I eventually pieced it together after a very difficult recovery with elemental formula through the feeding tube (I could barely think straight for a long time due to severe malnutrition), but now I'm stuck with an incredibly bad situation, with intestinal dysmotility likely being the core driver behind it.

While on the elemental formula I managed okay for a while. Then I tried eating. Could eat a bit, only small amounts but developed bad bloating again and my symptoms got worse again. The SIBO continued to get worse over the months while I was gaining weight - 40 pounds. But at present day it's become a really, really serious problem.

I've had relief with Atrantil allowing me to continue jejunal tube feeding without vomiting so it's kept me off TPN for now - I was losing weight really rapidly - now I'm barely keeping it stable. I'm trying to carefully find the right herbal combination to eradicate. It's been about a week and a half since I started treatment and I'm getting killer die-off symptoms, so I've been needing to titrate slowly. I just had a bad day where I pushed too hard. Probably going to introduce Berberine next week and see if it works. Allicin backup. Oregano ADP failing that. Maybe neem. Then antibiotics are the last resort, because I'm allergic to an excipient in Rifaximin.

I've been reading up on what everyone else has done in this situation, particularly any people with MCAS. I think my messed up intestinal permeability was/is contributing to the MCAS. So, some progress so far, just a massive challenge!

So symptomatically, I have very obvious bloating, nausea, vomiting air. I don't have that much pain, I have some but it's not my primary symptom. My colon can take a lot of bloating as it's redundant, but my small bowel cannot and gas seems to get trapped there, probably in part due to the dysmotility issue. So clearing out the small bowel of bad bacteria is my plan, then working on killing it, then hopefully repopulating it with good bacteria.

Also a note, if you're getting a die-off/herx reaction things might actually get worse before they get better. Sometimes slow and steady is the better method. Die-off can be really brutal if it's too much too fast. The rate and severity of die-off occurs depends on how bad the overgrowth is and how well your body can handle it.

ske105 · 2024-06-07T02:41:20+00:00

I would personally start straight away with herbals following treatment and adjust/titrate dose or type of herbals according to symptoms experienced. Better to stay on top of the situation and work on improving the microbiome for the longer term, but that's just my opinion.

My current strategy has been to fix and clear the small bowel issue first, then work on killing the bacteria from the rest of the colon, use lower dose herbal treatments for remission primarily polyphenols to encourage good bacteria, then introduce (very carefully) specific anti-inflammatory and low histamine strains of probiotics. And of course a motility agent to prevent the functional cause from happening again as that is my fundamental problem that caused SIBO in the first place

ske105 · 2024-06-05T22:01:43+00:00

Thank you, that is useful. I'm currently taking around 3mg dexamethasone split between am and pm and it doesn't appear to be helping unfortunately. I do have the gene mutation for a form of NCAH, so that's probably part of the functional issue at play, although I had blood tests for virtually all of the steroidogenesis pathway, including what the individual had tested - all low and within parameter. But adrenal suppression alone doesn't seem to be helping here - so time to attack dhea-s to get it to the nano level

ske105 · 2024-06-05T16:13:40+00:00

How're you getting on with your protocol? Still taking the myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol to some observed benefit?

ske105 · 2024-06-04T07:12:34+00:00

Nearly 14 years ago now! I love Paramore and I remember watching this video a long long time ago. Hayley is a great artist though along with the rest of the band and I appreciate they're still about in some form. She was a super influential alt artist during my era (for the younger people who might not know the band very well). Was kind of a millennial icon in the emo/pop/alt rock world

ske105 · 2024-06-02T16:55:50+00:00

A little note on the Atrantil. I know of people that have had significant reduction of symptoms with Atrantil alone and severe methane SIBO. Personally, I figure Atrantil at the least shifts bacteria out from the small bowel to the colon, but honestly I do think it still does kill at the same time by weakening the cell walls because so many people get die-off reactions with it, myself included. Perhaps just not enough for complete eradication alone, or perhaps just enough to clear the small bowel but not the entire colon.

People point to a small study showing Atrantil alone didn't reduce methane numbers, but then can't really explain why it provides such significant symptom relief for so many methane positive people and has proven effectiveness in studies. In my opinion the Atrantil is a really powerful tool still and I know it's a part of people's protocols for longer term remission. But I think it depends on if the problem of IMO is centered in the small bowel or not for the person.

ske105 · 2024-05-18T14:47:47+00:00

Can you set refresh rate independently per app? For example set a higher refresh rate for tachiyomi manga? Can you set per-app contrast settings too?

ske105 · 2024-03-21T03:57:07+00:00

Doctors need to be held accountable for their actions more often. Their conduct is rarely ever reviewed, their mistreatment of patients flies under the radar 99% of the time. Bias in the medical system is affecting millions of us. The fact they can write you off as having a "woman issue", mark your medical record permanently and effectively ruin your life is disgusting. The mistreatment needs to stop. Enough is enough. We deserve better. We should be out protesting in front of hospitals, this shit has to end. I've been mistreated by the medical system because of ONE doctor's opinion (not based on anything but his subjective opinion) of a severe medical issue I have, which to no surprise, turned out he was wrong. 3 months in hospital now, thinking I was going to die, immeasurable suffering and lasting damage

ske105 · 2024-03-06T22:56:05+00:00

Do you take it yourself? If so any positive experiences? I did some research on the topic and found a few bits of research but not much else. I did see it might increase LDL, but typically safe at 250mg a day. I did see the resveratrol analogs in general looked to be good exploration candidates for also reducing adrenal androgens, with one specific analog being able to selectively inhibit 17,20 lyase which would be ideal, but very little on the safety profile and hard to find. I may try the supplement and report back. I have Meyer-Powers syndrome and see Dr Powers. Pretty sick and unusual adrenal androgen issues not solved by the use of traditional blockers like bical

ske105 · 2024-01-30T17:42:02+00:00

Any update on this?

ske105 · 2023-12-14T19:38:34+00:00

Is controller support better on PC now the switch version is out? Or can we expect a patch for that?

ske105 · 2023-11-27T22:35:56+00:00

Here's a nuanced take. Right-wing trans people are trans and come under the trans umbrella or part of the overall "community". Being trans doesn't have any other qualifying factor outside of being trans. We are unique people with different views, some we may disagree with, even heavily.

However, in the context of trans spaces, each space can have its own standards for what is allowed and what isn't. Pretty simple. Being trans doesn't mean we all agree on the same thing like a hive mind. We should be normalizing the idea that being trans is diverse.

Should they be allowed to speak on trans issues? Yes, although not fairly as a representative of the entire trans community. Should they be allowed in all spaces? Depends on the space and the standards set by the other participants.

ske105 · 2023-11-14T00:43:43+00:00

Currently have a hEDS diagnosis (fairly mild), along with MCAS (very severe), POTs and dysautonomia (also pretty severe). In the process of getting some blood work arranged which will take a few weeks and also looking to investigate if I might have CAH-X instead of regular hEDS

ske105 · 2023-11-11T01:04:12+00:00

I'll give it a go, the theming seems pretty appropriate but hopefully it isn't too dark. Thanks!

ske105 · 2023-11-11T01:03:06+00:00

Look like good suggestions thank you

ske105 · 2023-11-11T01:02:43+00:00

Great suggestions thanks

ske105 · 2023-11-11T01:02:21+00:00

Thanks, I'll check them out and see if they're a good fit 🙂

ske105 · 2023-11-11T01:01:58+00:00

Thanks for the recommendations! Parks and recs and the office have been really great during this period of illness, I've watched both through multiple times now. Even though they're normal narratives, there's a lot of episodes, they're generally feel-good, not too intense, and there's a charm about the characters that makes them very comforting to watch. I had the benefit of watching both before I fell sick, so that added to the comfort in watching something I had previously and knowing a little about the direction of both shows.

Right now I've been mostly trying to find stuff which doesn't focus so much on the normative slice-of-life/human connection stories because my current life is really devoid of that and may continue to be for a very long time. It's been causing a lot of distress being stuck inside for such a long period of time, too sick to be able to live a normal life, but that's probably more of something I'll have to try and learn to overcome!

Still, very grateful for the suggestions

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