If you’ve worked with me, you know I work methodically and see illness as kind of a parfait of symptoms that build on each other. My job is to try to find what caused the illness in the first place and to peel back the layers until we recover healthy states. I recently had a very complex case that shows the value of trust and time in working through symptoms and eliminating the potential causes.
I had a 44-year-old woman start working with me about 1-2 years ago. She was diagnosed with a relatively rare syndrome called cyclical vomiting syndrome. Ultimately, it’s a syndrome that results in episodes of nausea and vomiting with no known cause. She also had bladder pain, migraines, and fatigue. She started having vomiting episodes when she was a child. There would be years without episodes, then one would come crashing down on her where she could vomit up to 40 times a day and would often need to be hospitalized for dehydration. Episodes would start with mouth sores, brain fog, dizziness, and joint pain. Over the years, she saw many practitioners and tried many medications with minimal success and lots of side effects. She has multiple family members with this syndrome as well.
Initially, I thought she had small intestine bacterial overgrowth. I confirmed this on testing and gave her treatment. While this helped many of her symptoms and even decreased the frequency of her vomiting episodes, they still didn’t go away. We kept treating other issues, such as mold, and each treatment chipped a little away at her symptoms, but we couldn’t get them eliminated. I couldn’t get a good handle of her “layers”.
About 8 months into working together, this patient was describing her most recent episode of vomiting. She offhandedly commented, “I get the mouth sores, bladder pain, and I sneeze multiple times in a row, then it progresses to vomiting” and I had a light bulb moment! Sneezing?! That sounds like histamine! So, we tried over the counter antihistamines, and they stopped her episodes immediately! Since then, we’ve discovered her severe PMS and menstrual cramping are also well managed with antihistamines.
In the past 5 months, the patient has continued to work on Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)/antihistamine treatment, and she has found she “genuinely feels well again for the first time in a long time”. She notes most of her symptoms are well controlled on the MCAS protocol and she was able to finish her first semester back in college with a stellar GPA after a 15-20 year school hiatus.
If it wasn’t for her mentioning the sneezing, I’m not sure we would have uncovered the key. Her hard work kept giving me information and helped me eliminate other potential causes, but it was luck (and time!) that gave us the key to unlocking our success together.
**This story was released with the permission of the patient.