Ive been hoping to put off addressing this issue until after the AFIB Report is wrapped up in the coming number of days to spare me any more delays, but this thread needs a response now, in my view.
Use of Magnesium as an often important adjunctive therapy. absolutely we agree wholeheartedly! But promoting Magnesium deficiency as the core cause and restoration the a prime, and even easy, 'cure' is absolutely not supported by our over 16 years of experience as the first and foremost website to promote Magnesium and potassium use, among a host of other life style and risk factor improvement protocols. Plus, when needed, an expert ablation process too as our confident best roadmap for success for the largest number of afibbers.
Magnesium, of course, has a key role as a very important, and in some cases a vital component of a successful overall comprehensive treatment in our recommendations for afibbers everywhere, But while individual readers of this forum are certainly free to believe, follow and discuss whatever ideas and concepts interest them and they feel are relevant, as the owner now and editor of the website and forum, it falls on me to determine where the line must be drawn as far as what concepts we can support and promote on the main forum.
For all of magnesiums wonderful properties and very important role in heart as well as total body health, it is NOT by any way, shape or means a universal cure for AFIB in my view!
I could not be more thrilled for you Mork that you are no longer suffering from AFIB and it's what we most wish for all of our readers here. Though I have not had the chance to read all of your posts here so far, the very little I have gleaned about your actual AFIB history is that after developing AFIB at some point in the distant past you have not had any symptomatic episodes that you are aware of at all for 10 years, largely from what you credit to be a cure from ongoing Magnesium repletion guided by Exatest results, is that about right? If you have shared substantially more than that about your own AFIB experiences and past, forgive my oversight here as I simply cannot keep up with every post these days.
We have all been right there too for many years on the importance of incorporating a dedicated and robust mineral and other key nutrient repletion program as part of our recommended best practices to effectively deal with AFIB. As noted above, this website was the first on the web to vigorously research and promote that idea over 16 years ago, and has championed those principles of first making a concerted effort to investigate and replace, any key biochemicals in our bodies that have gone missing or are likely to be deficient.
This key primary step is almost invariably the first, as well as an ongoing, recommendation for each person who comes here to continue with along with other important life style and cardiac risk factor reducing strategies and, when and if these first steps prove insufficient to effectively quiet the beast , then the inclusion of an expert ablation process is often recommended as the next, often watershed step, in a truly holistic and integrative approach to putting the genie back in the bottle to the best of our abilities. And all the while being open to utilizing ALL the best tools available to us whether they come from the natural or allopathic side of the same coin.
While I very much appreciate the various links and theories about magnesium's potential role in AFIB that you have shared here Mork, none of them are at all new or shed some dramatic new angle on the subject such that it might rewrite what we have learned from the many years of own in-depth real world exploration of this very topic, and from the many collective years from the school of hard knocks on this forum as well.
My net experience with Magnesium is one of great respect for its powers and utility in both helping to quiet an ectopic heart, but also calm nerves and sooth muscles and even clarify thinking. Magnesium, as you know, is a required component for over 300 key biochemical processes, so obviously it is a vital nutrient.
But the numbers of people who have come through here and made a real effort at discovering if Magnesium alone or in combination with other nutrients would be their golden key to AFIB freedom, and that have been unequivocally successful long term are comparatively few indeed.
I have no doubt that some people will, in fact, find their AFIB remit after restoring magnesium deficiency alone, all though only on occasion have I seen perhaps a a handful at most that claim that magnesium alone was the key element for them in what at least at the time had been a successful longer term break from AFIB for those afibbers. But consider too that in randomized control trials it is never sufficient for just a modest number of a given drug or procedure study derive either complete remission or some benefit, but a clear statistically significant benefit from the active study arm vs the controls is typically needed to call the drug or process a success, much less a cure.
And from the salutary effects I too have experienced, including that full 5 years of near total freedom from AFIB from not just magnesium but a host of nutrients and other protocols, and from the benefits I still gain from my daily intake of magnesium every day over the past 13 years, I can easily accept that this important mineral can well be the missing link for at least some, even if relatively few, people.
But implying that the still relatively modest number of people who posted positive results at the time Conference room 61 was posted, are now 'cured' by magnesium when they reported success at that time from a variety of protocols including most of them taking magnesium, and when we have heard nothing from a large number of these folks for years now, is indeed a very optimistic definition of a cure, and begs the question how many breakthroughs, if any , might you have had that still fall within your cure definition?
George could join the 'cured club' too then on those grounds and truly deserves it if any one does with his investigative smarts and dedication but he knows better as well and is happy enough with the success he continues to enjoy without reaching for labels.
Also Steve who also has have almost two years of success not with magnesium which he found ineffective largely in his case and that of his father, but did find great results with Calcium avoidance. Vitamin D in the 70ng/ml range and lots and lots of organic raw cranberries. I find that protocol more likely a candidate than magnesium alone, but like with Anti-Afib who is now pronounced by you as cured too after what was it, a year or a bit longer without any flippies? Which is far too short a time to be even considering another cure stat.
It almost sounds like reaching to fit people into a favored theory, which needless to say is hardly consistent with the scientific method. Again I'm not trying to degrade magnesiums potential value in AFIB care at all, nor deny your own great outcome which may well have largely been mediated by magnesium in your case, but rather I'm trying to keep it real within the reality so many of us have experienced first hand to convey what the majority can likely expect from our own collective experiences. But I realize too how hard it is to step back and see a broader view when a given person suddenly has long term success and it may be due mostly to one particular agent in their case. It can be very hard not to then project a universal cure and truly feel on a mission to spread the word.
I went 5 years of golden almost total silence with the Strategy before the beast came roaring back with a vengeance and no amount of Mag and Potassium could put Humpty dumpty back together again. A good number have had similarly long breaks before the wheels came off the wagon again with the exact same supplement intake that had been associated and no doubt very much did help quiet things done for a good long while before as before.
More often, in our experience, the best results seem to come from a combination of magnesium and other nutrients and other avenues as we all know from our more comprehensive Strategy protocol combined ultimately with an expert ablation process. But we urge everyone to find out first if they indeed can put this behind them with the natural protocols first and foremost. Yet even with all the beneficial impact the Strategy can and does bring, the numbers of people who have reported truly long term total success are still a very modest percentage of all those who have given the protocol a real dedicated effort over at least 6 months to a year and often much longer. Nevertheless, many more report at least partial benefit and that is certainly very worthwhile.
However, if Magnesium was truly THE core missing link, and not far more likely just one of a number of key secondary, tertiary or even further down the line influences in a very complex and constantly variable biochemical/physiological/genetic imbalance, we would have seen a far far greater response than we have with far fewer of us having had to resort to an expert ablation process to finally gain the upper hand and restore long term NSR.
Keep in mind too, Mork, that nearly every EP and Cardio who has been around the block can share with you stories of at least a handful of their patients who had aggressive AFIB for X amount of time and then suddenly and seemingly spontaneously went into remission and never had another episode!
It is not at all common, but it does happen, perhaps not much less frequently that those who 'apparently' find a 'cure-like' remission from Magnesium repletion alone long term? That reality must be acknowledged as a possible factor by all those who suddenly stop afibbing when they happen to be doing something new. If they start and stop the new agent with AFIB returning and leaving again consistently in response, then you have a much better clue that it wasn't just a spontaneous remission that one is crediting something else they just happen to be using at the time as the responsible agent.
Im not at all suggesting that magnesium is little more than a placebo, nor that taking magnesium alone is no more likely to work to any greater degree than the random odds of having your AFIB spontaneously disappear for very long periods including the rest of ones life. But by the same token, when you try to insist here that AFIB is a magnesium deficiency disease comparable in ANY way at all to Scurvy being a Vitamin C deficiency, that comparative analogy totally comes unglued and is not at all comparative!
Vitamin C is well known as an almost Universal cure for Scurvy, your odds of being almost on deaths door and then recovering from just enough Vitamin C absorption occurs with very high odds of success because Scurvy truly IS a Vitamin C deficiency disease .. period! And yet, I can count on one hand the numbers of people who can even just claim anecdotally that their AFIB went to sleep for good once they took enough magnesium!! This, trying to equate Scurvy and Vitamin C with our long experience of Magnesium alone and AFIB .. taking into account all magnesium's beneficial effects .. is a very very long projection Im afraid and a poor analogy indeed.
Nor am I at all arguing that AFIBs core cause is not likely a deep-seated metabolic imbalance that is driven, triggered or influenced to one degree or another by any number of nutritional, hormonal, substrate remodeling and/or scarring issues long term, but its very unlikely to come down to being fundamentally a magnesium deficiency disease at its core.
We require MUCH higher standards of evidence than that on this website before we start talking about a real potential 'cure; or of a 'core fundamental cause' of AFIB!
And The reason I'm so loath to call something a universal cure when it clearly is not, is that it strains credibility and then many of the physicians who I and other are trying to interest in using magnesium and other such natural agents too as part of a broader treatment palette, then get turned off the whole idea when they see a so claimed scientific method being used in such a fast and loose manner. And thus, stretching the case beyond magnesiums already important role it can very much have, often dies more harm than good in the process.
I would love nothing more than if even a significant minority of Afibbers could stop the beast in its tracks by only having to ingest enough magnesium to get their IC mag into a more optimal range on the EXAtest!
Ive done at least 10 EXA-tests in the past ( when I still had active arrhythmia) and they were a very valuable tool in my quest for freedom from AFIB.
In fact, it was Dr Burt Silver, one of the key developers and owner of EXAtest who, after carefully reviewing all of my Exatests together strongly advised me to get that LAA isolation ablation .. a fact that was was already obvious by then, three months prior to my LAA isolation ablation. when he said "Shannon you have a complex scenario and I highly recommend you go get that ablation ASAP as you are not going to be able to get your flutter fixed with electrolyte balancing.
I had been shocked 14 times in 14 months all the while taking boat loads of magnesium in the form of IV Myers Cocktalls with 4 grams Mag Sulfate once or twice a week for 9 months straight PLUS IM injections of 2 grams Mag Sulfate 5 days a week PLUS 700mg oral magnesium Glycinate and finally 25 sprays of Ancient Minerals topical Magnesium every morning after my shower!
That dosing finally got my very low IC mag levels up into decent range at 39 and I was taking sufficient potassium carefully guided by Cardymeter daily testing such that I never drifted above 5.0 serum K equivalent and keep my levels above 4.0K on the lower end.
Nevertheless, just as Dr Natale had told me 4 years earlier, that no matter what I do, until I get this last flutter circuit around my LAA addressed and put to sleep I would continue to have more frequent flutter breakthroughs, once the flutter episodes started in ernest after my persistent AFIB was put to sleep for good in my index ablation of 2008. He was right on the money with both his prediction that I would not have AFIB again and yet that Ineould need one more next time touch up to isolate my LAA to give me long term freedom from arrhythmia.
From the 5 years of near total success with the whole Strategy protocol before that first ablation, and that really was a big help then, I thought I knew better and could somehow figure out just the right mag and potassium dosing and just the right formula changes etc etc to recover my NSR again and so I let it drag on a good year or two longer tinkering away than I should have before getting even that first ablation and would up flipping into persistent AFIB as a result making my ablation process all
the more challenging.
Dr. Silver also said as well that some, but not all cases of AFIB 'have a good response to electrolyte therapy' and he never once came close to calling it a 'cure' in our discussions.
And Mork have you considered if it truly was magnesium alone that stopped your AFIB?? And not, perhaps, from some combination of changes of which getting your magnesium right may have been a key individual trigger for you among a cascade of biochemical events that played out in that way in your case?
AFIB, in all that I have witnessed and learned is far too variable with a broad range of individual responses to be labeling Magnesium deficiency the prime cause, and restoration of magnesium, the core cure for this awful disease. At least the evidence to date totally does not support it as a reliable cure for anything close to a majority of those who have seriously tried it.
As such, I prefer we discuss our experiences themselves with AFIB Mork, and not just post theories based on abstract excerpts which I know can often be inadvertently misleading, Share with us more of the details of your own struggles with AFIB and how you finally came about using Magnesium, some of the treatments and doctors you saw for your AFIB etc etc.. Put a story to the name of 'Mork', as most others here have done with using a real first name or a moniker but with their own real sharing of the ups and downs of their stories. Then each person will have a better feel for the flow of your own AFIB history, the steps you have had to walk and how indeed this remarkable, but not unprecedented, 10 years of freedom from AFIB happened, apparently just from Magnesium guided by the EXAtest?
Knowing these kinds of things will help most of our readers better gauge whether they have already 'been there and done that', or if indeed maybe you can share more insights than you have so far that might inspire others to give the same details of your process that you did a try. Or they may decide that your experience is of being one of the lucky relative few for whom it really was fairly easy, even if they have long ago covered the same ground you did and found it insufficient in their cases.
All that is fine with me, just lets go easy on claiming the CURE routine for now and it you wish to discuss that avenue then please do so in the General Health forum to post those kind of threads where more speculative interests can be further explored by all who wish too here without infusing the main forum too much with concepts that can be more confusing in the main forum. Its very confusing for new members who come here looking for solid guidance that we have found works well over the long term.
Had many of us, such as myself, not gone to exhaustive lengths proving to ourselves ultimately that magnesium will very useful was only an important piece of the AFIB management puzzle for the majority, but falls short of a cure for the vast majority of afibbers we know who have tried to find a cure there. If we did not have such an in-depth and long history of investigation with just as high hopes and expectations of finding our own cures via magnesium and the other nutrients too, then I would be more open to supporting such speculative musings on the main forum, but we are not just going to toss out 16 years of collective experience based on one or two reports from people whose in-depth AFIB histories we know little to nothing about.
I have a responsibility to both welcome a wide variety of opinion and experience here, but also not to allow the main forum to get too watered down with either far fetched speculation or going too far over ground we have already covered and found wanting, as in the case of a 'magnesium only cure' for AFIB. I have received now a good number of complaints about claims that appear poorly supported to want to see those continue on the main forum, so many thanks for respecting that.
The nuts and bolts of what you did for treating your AFIB before, during and after your discovery of magnesium and what else besides magnesium alone you might have done for your own good health or other protocols to improve cardiac health as well are all welcomed and would be useful in placing your experience in the kind of context nearly everyone here winds up sharing over time.
Thanks for reading and best wishes,
Shannon
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/04/2015 09:14AM by Shannon.