Grandma declined my offer to visit Dra. Divina Hey Gonzales once again.  She doesn’t want to visit any doctor.  I asked if she wanted to visit other doctors, maybe one of her grandchildren can recommend one.  She said no, she said she will just get her magnesium deficiency from her diet.

Sigh.  Dra. Divina Hey would have given splendid inputs as usual.  She helped me, Bugoy and my kids many times.  She knows western medicine, homeopathic and anthroposophic.  I’ll have to call up her secretary and cancel again.

As for the diet, grandma does not want supplements.  She said she will get her magnesium from food.  Nice strategy.

Grandma says she will stop all the stressful thinking.  Nice strategy too.

This morning she had papaya.  This lunch she had sayote and chicken.  This dinner she will have spinach and monggo sprouts, at least I hope she will, I had her nannie buy those.  She promised half cooked.  Maybe it will be enough.

Grandma says she wants to go to the ocean.  But she says she only has P 2,000 on her.  Not enough for the car, the gas and the driver.  Those were her words.  Maybe some other descendants there will provide a driver, a car and gas, and maybe your personal time if you can afford it.  I don’t know which beach she likes, I know we went to Quezon one time and she said she didn’t like that beach.

Any volunteers?

My initial internet research indicates that one of the main causes of magnesium deficiency is a dependence on laxatives. Well, because of my grandma’s chronic constipation, she was always using Dulcolax. And when dulcolax didn’t do the trick, out comes Dr. Tam’s Miracle Tea. She has been dependent on laxatives for many years now.

Her diet is lacking in magnesium too. Since her fruit intake is low, and her vegetable intake is always cooked. The problem with cooking vegetables is the minerals in it are converted back to rock form when cooked, which does a human no good. Humans need their trace minerals, like magnesium, in plant form whether from raw vegetables and ideally from raw fruits and raw nuts.

I have to get my grandmother a big bunch of raw pili nuts and have her gorge on them.

I told her the supplements I gave her are no match for real raw food.

I will be researching more about magnesium deficiency and will be extending this post… look here:

MAGNESIUM DEFICIENCY & SUDDEN DEATH
Written and Researched by Ronald J. Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O.

An athletic 20 year man is playing basketball and suddenly collapses on the court and dies.

On a hot July day, a young and vibrant college football player suddenly makes a great tackle and never gets up.. only to be pronounced dead 5 minutes later.

High School track runner dies after finishing second in a race.

The sad truth is 1 out of 50,000 young adults will fall victim to Sudden Death.

Most sudden deaths have been linked to a thickened, enlarged heart called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), or by a condition that disturbs the rhythm of the heart called an arrhythmia.

When one sweats, a significant amount of magnesium is lost. Magnesium is the most under-recognized electrolyte disorder in the U.S. Dr. Mildred Seelig, one of the country’s leading authorities on magnesium suggests that 80%-90% of the population is deficient is magnesium

It is beyond the extent of this article why the public is being denied the truth of the seriousness of magnesium deficiency and sudden death. The amount of medical research could fill a book, but it is unfortunately being ignored.

According to Micheal A. Brodsky M.D., associate professor of medicine at the University of Medicine and the director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service at the University of California.. mineral imbalances interfere with the heart’s normal nerve function.

While most athletes have been conditioned to drink a potassium rich drink after sweating.. very few have been educated on the dangers of a magnesium deficiency. Dr. Brodsky states that arrhythmia therapy should focus on replenishing two key minerals: potassium and magnesium.

Almost all physicians have known for some time just how vital potassium is for normal heartbeat. Magnesium is an entirely different story, however. According to Carla Sueta M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine “apparently, many doctors still don’t realize how important a role this mineral can play in some heart patients. In fact, most never check the magnesium level. She has shown through her research that magnesium reduced the incidence of several types of ventricular arrhythmia by 53 to 76 percent.

Magnesium deficiency can be induced by the very drugs meant to help heart problems. Some types of diuretics (water pills) cause the body to excrete both magnesium and potassium, as does digitalis. And magnesium deficiency is often at the bottom of what’s called refractory potassium deficiency. The amount of magnesium in the body determines the amount of a particular enzyme that determines the amount of potassium in the body,” he explains. So if you are magnesium-deficient, you may in turn be potassium-deficient, and no amount of potassium is going to correct this unless you are also getting enough magnesium.

The Best Test To Determine Your Level of Magnesium

Although most physicians rarely check this important mineral, the few that do usually rely on test called Serum Magnesium. Unfortunately, this test only measures approximately 1% of the magnesium in your body.. a poor test at best. The “Gold Standard” and the most accurate test is the RBC Minerals or more commonly called Elemental Analysis in Packed Erythrocytes. This test examines the levels of eight minerals and seven toxic heavy metals. The erythrocyte is the red blood cell that floats in our serum to carry oxygen to our cells. The minerals this test analyzes from inside the red blood cell includes magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, potassium, selenium, vanadium and zinc. Another test which has proven to be extremely valuable in detecting magnesium deficiencies is called the Urine Magnesium Loading Test. In this test, the patient collects a 24-hour urine sample and the total magnesium is measured. The patient is then given a dose Magnesium Chloride 18% and another 24-hour urine specimen is collected. The magnesium is again measured. If the body retains more than a certain amount of magnesium, then it is concluded that the body is magnesium deficient.

Common Symptoms of Magnesium Deficiency

The most common symptoms include back and neck pain, muscle spasms, anxiety, panic disorders, Raynaud’s spastic vessels, arrhythmia, fatigue, eye twitches, vertigo, migraines.

Best Sources of Magnesium

The best way of insuring enough magnesium is to eat a variety of whole foods, including whole grains, nuts, seeds and vegetables, preferably food grown on naturally composted soil. The green color of green vegetables is due to chlorophyll, which is a molecule that contains magnesium. Avoid refined processed foods, especially white sugar and white flour products, as most magnesium is removed from them.

Dr. Grisanti’s Comments:

If you are suffering with a heart problem and have not had your magnesium checked, then I want to urge you to have your physician order the two tests listed above. Unless you have proof that your magnesium is within normal levels, I want you to realize that you are playing with your health!

http://www.drgrisanti.com/magnesium.htm

——————–

Another article

http://george-eby-research.com/html/depression-anxiety.html

is even more comprehensive.  Read and learn why the calcium tablets my grandmother was taking was also causing magnesium deficiency.

I would think this magnesium deficiency has been going on for a very long time given the extensive research done already.

Good thing that hospital, the heart center, was now equipped with a magnesium test procedure.

Now we know, we have a clear guide on what to do.  Pinpointed.  I hope that is correct.  Dr Divina Hey can give more inputs.

We had a big scare. My grandmother almost died today. Heart beating disrupted. She wouldn’t wake up while being picked up by the driver. From the nannie’s description, she was pale, her lips darkened, she felt cold, her saliva drooling, and it took them many minutes just to wake her up.

Probably in the attempt to wake her up and lifting her to the car re-awakened her heart to beat and in the car she started being conscious.

Her sister said the best hospital to go to was Heart Center so there they went.

At the ER, they waited 2 hours before the blood test results came in.

Dra. Gonzales, resident doctor in the ER says that Nanay has magnesium deficiency. Her explanation was that the magnesium deficiency caused a disruption in her electrical signals which included her heart. Thus her heartbeat became irregular.

Looking back, in the car, they took her blood pressure and it read 150 / 110. Put 1 and 1 together with the heart disruption, when the heart started pumping again while in the car, it was trying to make up for lost time, to pump blood into the brain and circulate everything again, that may explain for the high blood pressure reading… simply because it was needed at that time.

So the big culprit is magnesium deficiency, which she could have been suffering for from quite some time. Magnesium deficiency is connected with constipation, her twitching / tremors, nerve signals to her legs.

Nanay and I had lots of time to talk while in the ER, she is very much awake, very smart, very much conversational.

She says the real reason she wanted to go home to Makati is because “namamahay siya”, her sleep is not deep and comfortable in a strange bed, she is looking for a familiar bed. Although she sleeps at 8:30pm in her sister’s house, her sleep is not continuous, not deep and not satisfying.

She and I confirmed that the upper part of her body from her torso up are strong and movement is not impaired. She still had quite a good grip on her, not bad from being rushed to the ER and not given anything yet. She is not really weak. It is her legs that are the problem. From the hips down, her legs just will not move on command, nor will her toes. So it is not about weakness, it is about nerve signals.

Hopefully those nerve signals can be restored. Maybe with nutrition and mechanical means. She says she has a phobia with chiropractors as the 1st and only chiropractor she went to in the past caused her unbearable pain.

So at 4pm she was given some magnesium diluted in dextrose intravenously. By 5:30 her nannie called me and she was being discharged.

We were able to leave by 8pm? Too much rain and traffic.

Her prescription was for 1 tiny aspirin per day for 30 days and 1/2 tablet of Enalapril 10mg for 30 days. Remember, just for 30 days. Not forever. Unlike the previous drugs she abused. I suspect she was misled and self medicating idiotically. I made it clear to her that she should forget all her previous drugs. She feels good, a placebo effect, which is good about these 2 new tiny drugs.

I made it clear with Nanay that her problem is magnesium deficiency and to solve her problem for the long term we were to source magnesium from food. The best is raw food from fruits and raw green vegetables including raw sprouts. She says yuck to raw. So I told her you can steam or half cook your vegetables, but they are just characterized as below good. Since she says yuck to raw vegetables, I gave her spirulina tablets, take 15 tablets a day as food, it has lots of magnesium. Also I gave her Dr. Tam’s Live Green, a combination of wheat grass, barley and kamut. I also gave her a spem health barley drink which is sweatened, which she may be able to like more. I also gave gingko biloba tablets she needs 4 tablets a day to help improve her blood circulation. I also left 2 small bottles of my cayenne tincture / sili tincture for emergencies. I told the nannie that should another crisis like this morning happen, she was to jam 1 bottle full in Nanay’s mouth then take nanay to the hospital. The cayenne tincture will open up blood vessels, give her a jolt of vitamin C and will wake up dead people.

It was 10pm when we arrived at her daughter’s place in Makati. With her daughter on a trip abroad, there were no vegetables in the kitchen. We inspected the refrigerator and found 1 sayote and 1 rotten bitter melon. Nothing else. So I gave money to her nannie to buy in the morning fresh vegetables, just good for 2 days. The Guadalupe market is the nearest from their village, 1 ride via jeep or MRT. I told her nannie to begin with monggo sprouts tomorrow.

I scheduled nanay to visit Dr. Divina Hey-Gonzales tomorrow 2pm. But later in the evening she changed her mind saying she was very tired and requested we reschedule that doctor visit to the following day. She knows how she feels so I’ll have to cancel tomorrow’s appointment and hope that the next day is available.

Before I left my grandmother said she had a headache and asked if she could take ibuprofen, a drug that conceals headaches.  I said, absolutely not.  I read the warnings at the back loudly at her so she knows how bad that idiotic ibuprofen drug is.  I told her to just drink up and go to sleep.

It’s been very tiring for me these past few days from caring for her back and forth, the resignation of my website editor so I am training a new editor, and the crash of a computer server hard drive (this one). I need some rest myself.