Food sensitivities, histamine and mast cell activation syndrome

Food sensitivities, histamine and mast cell activation syndrome — Note: This may be of interest to you if you have protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal issues, if you have autoimmune issues, and also other chronic illnesses like CFS and/or fibromyalgia

My food sensitivities have continued.

I tend to learn a whole lot by paying attention to them and they oddly allow me access to parts of the psyche for healing when I sit with them in meditation. It’s almost as though there is a psychedelic aspect to my experience with them. I am not alone in this. I’ve found others who have this experience too. They are difficult to live with and I continue to work with them from as many different windows as I can. None of these different lenses on this broad systemic phenomena are absolute or definitive in and of themselves. Such is the path of learning to deal with the body/mind/spirit in holistic fashion.

In western medicine the sensitivities are best explained and understood as a form of mast cell dysregulation, I’ve found.

I’ve not ever gone into that in any explicit fashion on this blog because I’ve tried to keep it simple and so I’ve talked about histamine intolerance mostly, which is often a manifestation of mast cell dysregulation. Because I’ve been so tragically wounded, and thus traumatized, by western medical practitioners I’ve not been able to easily work with doctors from that system and have not found a competent doctor who understands mast cell dysregulation all that profoundly, in any case, so what I know I’ve largely learned from my fellow sufferers who’ve done all the collection of data from their own bodies with practitioners in their lives. We compare notes on health forums.

I am hugely indebted to the networking around Yasmina Ykelenstam, The Low Histamine Chef.

With her and 37 other special women who’ve been following her work since the beginning I’ve been supported in ways for which I am forever grateful. Many of us have been able to piece together wellness in this way. We’re all very different and so it’s been an incredible experience of synergistic learning. (2024: Yasmina died in 2018. She remains an inspiration and is someone I never stop missing)

Some of my long-time friends in the chronic illness circles, in general, too have taught me critically important things that have helped my healing process. The truth is I wouldn’t have healed as much as I’ve healed without the input of folks gaining information from western medicine. It’s been a vital part of my process even while I’ve largely avoided directly subjecting myself to the machinations of the system on a practical level.

This serves as an introduction to the below video which features an unusually sensitive and empathic MD, Dr. Anne Maitland whose specialty is mast cell activation syndrome.

That is another way of calling what I prefer to simply call mast cell dysregulation. I’m sharing this video simply because I have, indeed, been remiss about passing on this information and I think it may be helpful to many of you.

This may be of interest to you if you have protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal issues, if you have autoimmune issues, and also other chronic illnesses like CFS and/or fibromyalgia and of course if you have food sensitivities in general. All these issues have a lot of crossover once they become chronic and longterm.

I’ve written about these crossovers from yet another window, that of the autonomic nervous system, here: Protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome, chronic illness, CFS, Fibromyalgia. Yeah, they all have things in common. 

The MD is a good speaker and the beginning of the talk very expertly talks about the different sorts of manifestations of sensitivities us folks are dealing with and the fact that we are often labeled hypochondriac or eating disordered. She’s not explicitly talking about histamine intolerance because it’s assumed. Histamine intolerance is part of the picture she speaks of. I think even if one doesn’t listen to the whole thing it may be helpful to a lot of the readers of this blog — not as an end, but as a beginning to further research.

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These issues and others became extreme for me upon withdrawal from a large cocktail of psychiatric drugs, but histamine intolerance and thus mast cell issues unrecognized can also lead to being drugged with psychiatric pharmaceuticals to begin with, from what I’ve seen, so anyone taking these drugs might want to rule out this condition. Being that a lot of neuroleptics and benzos and it seems SSRIs too all have significant anti-histamine properties this may impact a good number of folks. Since first starting to write about this I’ve heard from many readers who’ve found help in understanding their circumstances with this information.

Below are my two original posts on the topic of histamine intolerance. There are many more links that go to many additional sources for information within the text of those two posts as well.

more on topic:

This healing process has largely been a process of returning to the body. An embodiment process. See: The disembodied mess we’re in.

• Food sensitivities, histamine and mast cell activation syndrome
• Have you considered histamine intolerance associated with psych drug use and withdrawal?
• Histamine Intolerance: can be associated with folks getting psychiatric diagnosis
• The histamine intolerance link and how this paleo girl went vegetarian (even vegan, for the time being!)
• Histamine intolerance (likely to apply to others on psych meds and coming off them too)

and a collection of links and info:

• Histamine intolerance round-up

And on Detox:

• Detoxification (which is really about balancing the internal ecosystem): healthy living for body/mind/spirit
• Physical, mental, emotional – all ONE (Chinese / Ayurvedic systems have known this for millennia)

SEE ALSO:

**POSTS ON BEING HYPERSENSITIVE IN GENERAL HERE

**Working with somatic issues from sensitivities here

For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page or scroll down the homepage for more recent postings. 

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