Connie asked me

[Guest guest]

to back up my statement about us having a " small heart " . More

accurately i meant a malfunctioning, underperforming pace Peckerman

cited below. DR Cheney cited before also buys into this. Pace

Poesnecker I think other organs such as adrenals are also

underperforming.

But I also mean it(following Buhners Secret language of plants) in a

spiritual sense. As a society we are domininated by the brain

rather than the heart, and for us more sensitive ones that causes

illness.

I have been told the herb ayauscha captures the spirit of the heart.

Wallace

www.drmyhill.co.uk has a few articles on the heart including the one

below

CFS is Heart Failure Secondary to Mitochondrial Malfunction

Two papers have come to my notice recently which make great sense of

both my clinical observations and also the idea that CFS is a symptom

of mitochondrial failure. The two symptoms I am looking for in CFS to

make the diagnosis is firstly very poor stamina and secondly delayed

fatigue. I think I can now explain these in terms of what is going on

inside cells and the effects on major organs of the body (primarily

the heart). More importantly, there are major implications for a test

for CFS and of course management and recovery.

If mitochondria (the little batteries found inside every cell in the

body) do not work properly, then the energy supply to every cell in

the body will be impaired. This includes the heart. Many of the

symptoms of CFS could be explained by heart failure because the heart

muscle cannot work properly. Cardiologists and other doctors are used

to dealing with heart failure due to poor blood supply to the heart

itself. In CFS the heart failure is caused by poor muscle function

and therefore strictly speaking is a cardiomyopathy. This means the

function of the heart will be very abnormal, but traditional tests of

heart failure, such as ECG, ECHOs, angiograms etc, will be normal.

Thanks to work by Dr Arnold Peckerman www.cfids-cab.org/cfs-

inform/Coicfs/peckerman.etal.03.pdf we now know that cardiac output

in CFS patients is impaired. Furthermore, the level of impairment

correlates very closely to the level of disability in patients. Dr

Peckerman was asked by the US National Institutes of Health to

develop a test for CFS in order to help them to judge the level of

disability in patients claiming Social Security patients. Peckerman

is a cardiologist and on the basis that CFS presents with low blood

pressure, low blood volume and perfusion defects, he surmised CFS

patients were in heart failure. To test this he came up with Q

scores.

Q scores

" Q " stands for cardiac output in litres per minute and this can be

measured using a totally non-invasive method called Impedance

Cardiography. This allows one to accurately measure cardiac output by

measuring the electrical impedance across the chest wall. The greater

the blood flow the less the impedance. This can be adjusted according

to chest and body size to produce a reliable measurement (this is

done using a standard algorithm). It is important to do this test in

the upright position and again when supine (lying flat on your back).

This is because cardiac output in healthy fit people will vary from 7

litres per min when supine to 5 litres per min when standing up. In

healthy people this drop is not enough to affect function, but in CFS

sufferers the drop may be from 5 litres lying down to 3.5 litres

standing up. At this level the sufferer has a cardiac output which

causes borderline organ failure.

This explains why CFS patients feel much better lying down. They have

acceptable cardiac output lying down, but standing up they are in

borderline heart and organ failure. CFS is therefore the symptom

which prevents the patient developing complete heart failure.

Actually, everyone feels more rested when they are sitting down with

their feet up (not least my daughters!) The subconscious has worked

out that the heart has to work less hard when you are sitting down

with your feet up, so we do so because we feel more comfortable.

Low cardiac output explains the symptoms of CFS

The job of the heart is to maintain blood pressure. If the blood

pressure falls, organs start to fail. If the heart is working

inadequately as a pump then the only way blood pressure can be

sustained is by shutting down blood supply to organs. Organs are shut

down in terms of priority, i.e. the skin first, then muscles,

followed by liver, gut, brain and finally the heart, lung and kidney.

As these organ systems shut down, this creates further problems for

the body in terms of toxic overload, susceptibility to viruses which

damage mitochondria further, thus exacerbating all the problems of

the CFS sufferer.

1. Effects on the skin

If you shut down the blood supply to the skin, this has two main

effects. The first is that the skin is responsible for controlling

the temperature of the body. This means that CFS patients become

intolerant of heat. If the body gets too hot then it cannot lose heat

through the skin (because it has no blood supply) and the core

temperature increases. The only way the body can compensate for this

is by switching off the thyroid gland (which is responsible for the

level of metabolic activity in the body and hence heat generation)

and so one gets a compensatory underactive thyroid. This alone

worsens the problems of fatigue.

The second problem is that if the micro-circulation in the skin is

shut down, then the body cannot sweat. Sweating is a major way

through which toxins, particularly heavy metals, pesticides and

volatile organic compounds, are excreted. Therefore the CFS

sufferer's body is much better at accumulating toxins, which of

course further damage mitochondria.

2. Symptoms in muscles

If the blood supply to muscles is impaired, then muscles quickly run

out of oxygen when one starts to exercise. With no oxygen in the

muscles the cells switch over to anaerobic metabolism, which produces

lactic acid and it is this that makes muscles ache so much.

As well as the above problem, muscles in the CFS patient have very

poor stamina because the mitochondria which supply them with energy

are malfunctioning.

3. Symptoms in the liver and gut

Poor blood supply to the gut results in inefficient digestion, poor

production of digestive juices and leaky gut syndrome. Leaky gut

syndrome causes many other problems such as allergies, autoimmunity,

malabsorption, etc., which further compound the problems of CFS.

If liver circulation is inadequate, this will result in poor

detoxification, not just of heavy metals, pesticides and volatile

organic compounds, but also toxins produced as a result of

fermentation in the gut again further poisoning the mitochondria.

4. Effects on the brain

In October 2004 I attended a conference sponsored by the late Dr

. A Canadian physician Byron Hyde showed us some functional

scans of the brains of CFS patients. If I had not known the

diagnosis, I would have diagnosed strokes. This is because the blood

supply to some area of the brain was so impaired. The default is

temporary and with rest, blood supply recovers. However, this

explains the multiplicity of brain symptoms suffered from, such as

poor short term memory, difficulty multi-tasking, slow mental

processing and so on. Furthermore brain cells are not particularly

well stocked with mitochondria and therefore they run out of energy

very quickly.

5. Effects on the heart

There are two effects on the heart. The first effect of poor micro-

circulation to the heart is disturbance of the electrical

conductivity which causes dysrhythmias. Many patients with chronic

fatigue syndrome complain of palpitations, missed heart beats or

whatever. This is particularly the case in patients with poisoning by

chemicals since the chemicals are also directly toxic to nerve cells.

The second obvious result is poor exercise tolerance. Heart muscle

fatigues in just the same way that other muscles fatigue.

Symptomatically this causes chest pain and fatigue. In the longer

term it can cause heart valve defects because the muscles which

normally hold the mitral valve open also fatigue.

The difference between this type of heart failure and medically

recognised congestive cardiac failure is that patients with CFS

protect themselves from organ failure because of their fatigue

symptoms. Patients with congestive cardiac failure initially do not

get fatigue and often present with organ failures such as kidney

failure or overt heart failure. At present I do not know why there is

this difference.

THIS APPROACH TO TREATING HEART DISEASE IS EXACTLY THE SAME

REGARDLESS OF THE CONVENTIONAL DIAGNOSIS

So patients with angina, high blood pressure, heart failure,

cardiomyopathy, some valve defects as well as patients with cardiac

dysrhythmias also have mitochondrial problems and will respond in the

same way to nutritional therapies and detox therapies.

6. Effects on lung and kidney

The lung and kidney are relatively protected against poor micro-

circulation because they have the largest renin angiotensin system,

which keeps the blood pressure up in these vital organs. Therefore

clinically one does not see patients with kidney failure or pulmonary

hypoperfusion in CFS.

Explanation of the fatigue problems in CFS patients.

Energy to the body is supplied by mitochondria, which produce NAD

(nicotinamide adenosine diphosphate) and ATP (adenosine

triphosphate). These molecules are the " currency " of energy in the

body. Almost all energy requiring processes in the body have to

be " paid for " with NAD and ATP, but largely ATP. The reserves of ATP

in cells are very small. At any one moment in heart muscle cells

there is only enough ATP to last about ten contractions. Thus the

mitochondria have to be extremely good at re-cycling ATP to keep the

cell constantly supplied with energy.

If the cell is not very efficient at re-cycling ATP, then the cell

runs out of energy very quickly and this causes the symptoms of

weakness and poor stamina. The cell literally has to " hibernate " and

wait until more ATP has been manufactured.

Energy is produced when ATP (three phosphates) is converted into ADP

(two phosphates). ADP is then re-cycled back through mitochondria to

create more ATP for future energy production.

However, if the cell is pushed when there is no ATP about, then it

will start to use ADP instead. The body can create energy from ADP to

AMP (one phosphate), but the trouble is that AMP cannot be re-cycled.

The only way that ADP can be regenerated is by making from fresh

ingredients, but this takes days to do. This explains the delayed

fatigue seen in chronic fatigue syndrome.

So to summarise, the basic pathology in CFS is slow re-cycling of ATP

to ADP and back to ATP again. If patients push themselves and make

more energy demands, then ADP is converted to AMP which cannot be

recycled and it is this which is responsible for the delayed fatigue.

This is because it takes the body several days to make fresh ATP from

new ingredients. When patients overdo things and " hit a brick wall "

this is because they have no ATP or ADP to function at all.

Imp