Also im still at a complete loss as to why everyone is trying to claim naturapaths as “quakery” when Letsconvenince has stated that he has made a full recovery. There’s your proof right there.
You guys can make your own mind up. Just remember though, the guy who first thought of taking people’s urine and testing it was probably slammed by everyone too. Its just par for the course of medicine moving forward into unknown territory. Get on board or be left behind. The choice is completely yours.
Ive taken the blood test and im starting the urine test in the morning. This might show nothing but so far its cost me nothing but some blood and some urine(to come) what have i lost for trying? Hair test will be next…
Well done Tim…the more guys who are willing to try things to get better on this forum, the faster we will start finding answers.
I spoke to my naturapath today and she agreed the HMA is a good idea. I see her in a couple weeks and will get a referal.
From a website on Polio:
“2. Medicinal Drugs
(Drugs that increase oestrogen - ie HRT or the Pill will increase copper retention - also sedatives, tranquillisers and psychotic drugs.)”
you do realize that letsconvenience posted a full recovery years ago (oddly saying that he had to post in 15 minutes because he HAD to leave) only to come back years later with a whole different theory to blame it on copper. who is to say that this full recovery is not, yet again, false?
listen, i’m not trying to be an ass, but the fact that you guys are looking for stuff like copper poisoning unless you worked in something like a metal factory or ate metal or something random like that - or unless your finasteride contained a percentage of metal - is pulling at straws. is your estrogen even high? mine is low. your likely setting yourself up for disappointment. i know it hurts to hear that something more serious might be going on, but realizing that is the first step of moving on.
No golf
I dont belive this is the answer but its something that can be dismissed if we get a few tests done.
cool. looking forward to your results.
Golf, sure its a bit suss if he did that. But its uncanny how his protocol and the one that I am currently on is almost identical. I have copper toxicity. I know this. I knew I had it before I took Finasteride. I have also since been diagnosed with low dopamine amongst a few others.
The way copper toxicity happens is mainly through drinking water. They use copper pipes and it ends up in the water and you drink it. It can also happen by swimming in pools a lot and a few other ways. If you dont get enough zinc in your diet it can tip into copper excess and it just snowballs. Now when this happens and you add high estrogen, its just like stoking the fire as estrogen is a catalyst for copper excess to get out of control. So theres your answer on how excess copper is linked to Finasteride - its Estrogen.
Your estrogen may well be low Golf, perhaps because your whole HPTA has shut down. Doesnt mean you didnt have high Estrogen while on Finasteride and it doesnt mean your copper is not high now.
The last sentence of yours is a little condescending. Do some research and learn how heavy metal toxicity works before you start claiming that I have acceptence problems or that im clutching at straws.
Is Letsconvenience still here? I hope he doesnt go missing again…
OK Letsconveinience,
Im cr*apping through the eye of a needle here 
Is it the Ox Bile or am I starting to detox some copper?
One thing ive definately notices so far since taking zinc is that my urine is not cloudly any more. I think this is the prostate getting better. I usually have a constant urinary tract infection type deal going and my urine is very cloudy.
This seems to have cleared up so far.
Unfortunately,
this is the more likely realty. We are all so desperate to recover many of us will believe anything, just for hope. Hope keeps you going.
But if you do believe this guy, he was close to being recovered before being turned onto the this copper poisoning. So, what ever recovery he got from it, couldn’t have been much. Additionall, it needs be fatored in that the guy only used the pill for 2 weeks. Sorry, that does not compare to years of damage.
I agree with what you are saying Golf, why would anyone post that they recovered 100%, never post of complaints again, then come back years later and say they have recovered again.
To be an honest, I was thinking this from the beginning when I first read this thread and looked at his user ID history.
I’m hoping this is this the holy grail recovery, but I’m very very skeptical that it isn’t.
Here’s an interesting study showing that zinc supplementation has barely any effect on T levels.
nature.com/ejcn/journal/v63/ … 2899a.html
I was slightly surprised by this given that Shippen recommends its usage and I’ve seen anecdotal comments from fin users that taking it ON the drug has stopped very bad sides. Probably has more of an anti-estrogen effect.
Or an anti-copper effect, since copper makes you estrogenic…
Interesting article…
I’m wondering if zinc has some mechanism further down the line before T production. It’s responsible for over 300 different roles in the body. Considering how much it’s a male mineral, I wonder if the body simply needs it for libido as libido is such a complex and mis understood thing. This is pure speculation but it is interesting how some guys here report very good things even if it’s only temporary. Could be that initially, like letsconvinience, the zinc is dominent, but then after a short while you start detoxing copper. Which in the long run is a good thing.
Heres an article linking high bilirubin to copper toxicity. A few guys including myself on this forum have high bilrubin: (I also have ear aches all the time even before Fin)
“Jaundice and high bilirubin levels are signs of copper toxicity, as is earaches and ear infections.”
I would also like to bring everyones attention to tim1911983’s post today so it doesnt get lost: (thats 4 of us with copper toxicity labs)
"COPPER BLOODTEST
Copper 20.9 (12.3-17.3) HIGH
Urine results to follow"
Actually testing for high copper via blood test would be a cheap and non-invasive test for everyone I suspect. Testing bilirubin is also an easy way to tell. Having said that though, your copper needs to be rediculously high for it to show up high on blood tests. But it could be a first step that is easy and my result in a pattern we havnt looked into yet.
If serum blood tests are within range, the next step would be to get a hair mineral analyis and have interpreted properly. I would ask ARL Pathology to recomend someone who can interpret them or go through the guy Letsconvienince suggested if its possible to contact him.
Copper is a tricky thing to diagnose unless its astronomically high like Tim’s is. The other easy way to do it is to test for zinc deficiency via a taste test. You can get this at any good pharmacy for about $20…
Serum Copper could be somthing we could slap onto the end of the long list of recomended standard blood tests? Is there a sticky for it somwhere?
Hi everybody!
Aside from dabbling with some private messages here and there, I haven’t been checking in on the board. I’m in the middle of a massive roadtrip across the US and internet access is limited to my friends’ houses across the country, as I don’t have my laptop with me and can’t hop on a computer in a heartbeat like I can at home.
So, having said all that, here are a few answers to questions that have been posed since I last came on.
Yes, I realize I did boast of a recovery years before on a dopamine regime. At the time, I did feel 100% recovered; between the euphoria of feeling normal plus, as some of you have commented on, the sheer drive of wanting something to believe in, I did brag of a full recovery perhaps too early. But actually I did feel great after my dopamine routine for close to a year, when things began to taper off again for me. It was definitely discouraging, but I went back to experimenting on myself, researching as much as I could, and then I stumbled onto copper toxicity. I realize my credibility may be sketchy to many of you, and that’s entirely warranted, but at the same time, I’m not trying to push this view down anybody’s throats. I’ve always tried to share what has worked for me, and people are free to do what they wish with the information. For anybody curious, I think the “dopamine routine” I was on likely improved my thyroid function, which helped regulate my body and make me feel back to normal for quite some time. In other words, dopamine-boosting nutrients like tyrosine and iodine (in small doses) also support the thyroid, and my thyroid was likely compensating for other weaknesses in my endocrine system.
I’m no nurtitionist, but from my understanding of nutrition, if you have high hair levels of a nutrient, it means your body is either a) expelling it, or b) using it up rapidly. So high nutrient levels could indicate either a need to remove something or a need to take more of it. It’s up to a trained (and savvy) nutritionist to interpret results like this for you. The one I recommend is Alex Tuggle! He’s a super hero in my book.
Not at all. A hair analysis only reflects what your body is pushing out of itself through the hair (on an interesting note, this is likely why you’re almost always going to test low for iron on a hair analysis, since not that much iron comes out through the hair in the first place). My first hair analysis indicated that my copper levels were 100% normal at 2.5 parts per million, but after 10 weeks on a nutritional-balancing program, the copper level shot up to 3.9ppm. In other words, my liver et. al. had gotten back on track enough to start pushing out the copper, which drove up the value on my hair test. As of my third test, copper levels are much lower–I believe 1.9ppm–which is a little lower than normal, but a great sign that my body is sorting itself out.
Most literature available on the internet seems to extremely endorse or poo-poo hair analysis, but there’s not much of a middle ground. I narrowed down my search to two labs I was interested in using, then found a nutritionist that worked with Analytical Research Labs, one of the two. I’m tremendously satisfied with the results of my protocol, so I recommend them. If you’re interested in pursuing hair analysis, I completely recommend it in my experience. My only caveat is that nutritional balancing is quite a gradual process, so anybody hoping for lightning fast results will be disappointed. On a personal note, I thought it was really cool to see how my mineral levels were changing, then compare that with my improvements in mood and physical function. But to address the question at hand, in my experience, hair analysis is valid, but I’m also working with a person I consider to be a gifted nutritionist, so my progress in all this has been very guided.
Sodium and magnesium oppose each other, so taking one is going to decrease the other to some degree. Finasteride poisoning seems to eat up calcium and magnesium, and if you’re anything like me, you experienced bad calf cramps and little hard balls in your ear lobe (only in my right ear lobe, personally) as time goes by. I was on my balancing program for about two months before my pesky calf cramps finally went away, and this has been attributed to my body regaining adequate levels of both calcium and magnesium. So if you’ve been suffering FP side effects for quite a while, my guess is that your magnesium is low, so rapidly boosting sodium could possibly make side effects caused by low magnesium (calf cramps, anxiety, constipation) worse.
It’s definitely indicative of the fact that you are taking ox bile! Having said that, diarrhea can be one of two things. On one hand, you may be taking too much ox bile. On the other hand, the ox bile may be helping to break down certain things in your digestive tract that your body has put off digesting–things like metals and fungus. If the diarrhea is excessive and causing you, uh, awkward itching, in my experience just going off the stuff for a few days, then resuming it if necessary, is a helpful course of action.
I haven’t made this clear, but I would like to directly express my embarrassment for declaring a full recovery years back when that wasn’t the case. It seemed to me like it was the real deal, and I was so eager to share my news that I jumped the gun. I do understand the damage it does to any credibility of what I may be saying now, but I hope that doesn’t discourage anyone possibly interested in hair analysis from pursuing it.
Another point worth reiterating: your first hair analysis will likely only have a few funny things on it. For my first test, my zinc was low, my sodium was super super super low, and my calcium and magnesium ratio was screwed up. Aside from that, most of my metals seemed normal. However, after my second test, when I started feeling tremendously better, I could see how a bunch of crazy crap started coming out of the woodwork: my copper shot up, my calcium and magnesium took a drastic step toward better balance, and quite a bit of lead started coming out of me. As of my third test, things have really balanced out in a wonderful way, but my zinc and sodium are still low. So I’m taking a bit of stuff to help boost both of those two, and then I’m probably going to end up taking a multi-vitamin for a while to make sure my adrenal glands have what they need to continue normal function until it seems like they’re 100% back on track.
J89, you’re doing a terrific job of carrying the torch, but I wouldn’t bother arguing. It’s going to cause both you and the other side to dig your respective heels further in the sand, and it’s likely going to be a deterrent for anyone considering hair analysis and/or copper toxicity. I advocate making the information available and letting people do with it as they will. But your enthusiasm for the subject is definitely appreciated (if not emulated) by me!
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Okay, one final final note, but just to make a plug for the umpteenth time: I strongly recommend the services of Alex Tuggle, nutritionist extraordinaire. He uses Analytical Research Labs for hair analysis and can recommend a very effective (if somewhat plodding) nutritional balancing program. He also answers any number of ridiculous questions through both email and phone, and is just a terrific guy all around. Simply getting a hair test and trying to make sense of it yourself is unlikely to get you anywhere, but with some practical guidance, you can really take a step toward feeling better. Per usual, all of these statements are based on my personal experience, which I am more than happy to share either on the board or through private messages (the latter guaranteeing a faster reply). Regardless of whatever path one may choose to beat this thing, I hope it ends exactly how you’d like it to! Ooh, except for the heroin guy. I read something on here once about a guy using heroin, and I’m not sure if that was the best way to go about things. So maybe heroin guy, I especially recommend you to look into hair analysis, since I assume it’s much safer (and legal!) than heroin.
He states that his problem was due to low dopimine levels, however he also stated that he never had any bloodwork done.
Through my research I have learned that high prolactin levels indicates low dopimine levels. So possibly, if he would have gotten some bloodwork done…
he would have learned that he had high prolactin levels. Then doctors would have the given him Wellbutrin to bring it up.
Hi Letsconveinience, please forgive me if this has already been asked but did you ever get any blood tests done? How were your hormones and what made you decide to go on testosterone replacement?
Im not trying to ram this copper idea down everyones throat, im just defending the idea when it is questioned. Construsctive criticism! I really do think you’re onto something with not just the copper, but the whole hair mineral analysis.
Ive been reading accross a few body building forums that something called “SCIO Therapy” is the latest thing for guys trying to recover after steroid abuse. It involves testing your body via energy feedback (somehow) and finding what vitamins and minerals your body is lacking and replacing them. From what ive read, all sorts of deficiencies are popping up and a lot of guys swear by this method of recovery.
quantumenergywellness.com/index-7.htm
Also this is hearsay but apparently the pharmecuetical companies of the world were so peed off at this guy and what he “knows” that the founder of SCIO Therapy is now in hiding somewhere.
Take what you want out of it, but research SCIO and see what you can find. I will try and find some links to put up about it too.