Testimonials

I’m a 51 year old male. My symptoms first started ten years ago with nocturnal polyuria, which was quickly followed by anxiety, poor sleep, panic, mania, and psychosis. I was diagnosed by several psychiatric doctors as having bipolar disorder and was prescribed the standard psychiatric medications (lithium & olanzapine). No connection to my nocturnal polyuria was made. Through careful observation of links between changes in my environment (exposure to light resulting in circadian rhythm changes and exposure to heat resulting in sweating) and changes in my symptoms, I discovered that I had a hormone problem that caused my sodium level to frequently drop to unhealthy levels. Over the last three years I’ve been perfecting my treatment and I’ve found the only medication I really needed was a diet in which the sodium concentration was close to that of normal blood, i.e. about 8g of salt (NaCl) for every liter of water (food and drink) consumed. In effect I'm now manually regulating my sodium level. I also found that extra light exposure in the evening reduced sodium loss. In addition to curing my mental symptoms, my nocturnal polyuria has also cured as a result of this treatment, probably because my body gets the salt it needs with less water absorbed. From my research I found that psychiatric patients are 10 times more likely to be hyponatremic (low in sodium) than all other patients upon hospital admission. In psychiatric journals they report this figure as 10% versus 1% and don’t appreciate its significance. Too often they consider hyponatremia to be the result of polydipsia (another mental disorder) instead of a possible cause of many mental illnesses. I've found that my sodium level has a circadian rhythm – the lowest level occurs in the evening. If doctors could consistently measure sodium levels the evening before admission they would find this ratio to be even higher.