Some of you are familiar with Lauren, the Youtuber, who has chronicled her life with schizoaffective disorder. Her channel used to be called “Living Well After Schizophrenia.”
I visited it recently and she has renamed it “Lauren Kennedy West.” She has stopped taking medication and believes she is no longer suffering from SZ. She attributes this amazing development to the strict medical keto program she began less than a year ago.
Her videos chronicle her life dealing with SZ, and her more recent progress with metabolic therapy. Assuming she stays stable and doesn’t re-experience symptoms, or at least not sufficient to need any other treatment, hers truly will be another example of what could be the first-line treatment of SZ in the future, at least for some people.
There is a lot more incredible stuff happening in the gut-brain-microbiome-metabolic field, and it well may be the future key to treating a whole host of conditions, including those until now thought to be the sole province of the brain.
My main concern is: how can these therapies be practically applied to adults who suffer from anosognosia or otherwise refuse treatment of any kind? Or who have limited finances and don’t live near urban centers that offer these services? Following a strict medical keto regime is very involved, and difficult to implement in a society awash in low-quality carbs – which appear to be the trigger and exacerbating factor in many health conditions.
Lauren required the help of a keto coach, a psychiatrist to help her taper down off meds, her therapist to walk her through the challenges of it all, probably also a regular MD familiar with this treatment, and she had to wear a continuous keto monitor. She also had an incredibly supportive spouse who went on the same diet even though he doesn’t have MI.
Each person has their own path. If the person wanted to be their most healthy self, or to lose weight, they could be told about Keto. When at her worst, my daughter would not even eat, let alone try ANY kind of therapy. I sure tried. Now that she has recovered to a new life, she still won’t do Keto, even though I have been on Dr. Eric Berg’s version of it for two years after my breast cancer battle. She could easily eat what I eat and does want to lose weight, but says to me, “Maybe in 5 years if what I try to do in the meanwhile to lose weight doesn’t work…”
I’m happy for Lauren’s success and it is great she was able to afford the coaching and therapy she needed. I, however, don’t feel that most people affected by Sz could follow her path, but to anyone who can, it is good she has chronicled her success.
Considering this is much more restrictive and requires more investment than traditional daily neuroleptic treatment or long lasting injections, I’m doubtful you could get much buy-in from people with Anosognosia. If you don’t think you’re ill, why would you go through such intense and restrictive monitoring? I feel only highly motivated diagnosed people with significant insight are likely to continue this regimen. Might work in a clinical in-patient setting, but significant behavioral modification and training and monitoring would need to follow. Considering many undiagnosed people struggle complying with low carb diets without a SMI, I think it would be a pretty tall order with both a SMI and Anosognosia.
Don’t get me wrong, my diet is very much carb restricted, but it’s more to stave off type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. My SZA symptoms had mostly faded before I started this diet, and I’m more likely to attribute it to research that indicates a subset of people spontaneously remit than claim it’s a miracle diet. I also continue low dosage atypical neuroleptic l, as I feel it’s cheap insurance.
While I’m happy for her present success, I recall times when she’s reported relapses on other treatment regimes. I feel it’s important when you have an atypical progression or recovery, it’s important to represent yourself as a research sample of one and point people to more mainstream therapies as first line treatments until quality studies are available.
Don’t know much about it other than the novel approach of targeting the cholinergic rather than the dopamine system. As I recall most of the typical and first and second generation atypical neuroleptic drugs I’ve used had mild anticholinergic side effects. My understanding was these were attributed to dry mouth and rigidity issues I’d experienced with them. Not debilitating, but definitely annoying.
Seems like they have these better targeted now, considering the stated side effect profile. Since this is new, I’d be pretty cautious unless nothing else works. My experience with new medications has been mixed— especially with the first atypical I tried which was expensive, had the usual unrealized hype about negative symptoms and appeared to spiral me into a deep depression until I switched back to my first typical AP medication. I find the best indicator that a new medication matches its hype is if it gets onto insurance companies preferred medication list before it goes generic.
University north chapel did study march 2021? 12 out of 17 sz patients tested.positive for bacteria or virus which is same as catch scratch fever…said.could be cause as petsnget and have in their finger nails andnif they scratch you and it breaks skin
This definitely happens to my son…also they said something takes it away like sodium phosphate…i cant rememver vut it wasnlike an iodine…i mentioned to doctor could we tey it…who ignore me…more studies werengoing to be done i think so neednto seenif they did more…or what is in the new schizophrenic deug that just came out oct 2024?