In her article, ‘Introducing POTS: The Next Social Contagion to Grip Miserable Teenage Girls‘, Mary Gilleece implies that POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) is something troubled young women are imagining or making up. I disagree.
While any illness can attempt to be mimicked, true POTS can’t fall in to the ‘social contagion’ category. It has observable, measurable symptoms. It is acknowledged and treated by several (but not enough) fantastic doctors both in the NHS and privately. It’s not just based on a ‘feeling’ you have nor on self-assessed symptoms. POTS is relatively recently understood. It was first written about in the BMJ in the mid-90s, so there is low but growing awareness in the medical community. The diagnostic criteria are often missed due to the fact that heart rate is usually taken while sitting and symptoms vary within a day and seasonally. For many, POTS is debilitating.
Currently POTS is diagnosed when an inappropriate rise in heart rate of greater than 30 bpm standing (40 bpm for under-20s), compared to resting, is observed. No one can fake that. Because of the challenges in diagnosing POTS there are many delays to getting diagnosed and being given appropriate help. Due to the broken state of the NHS, waiting lists to see a consultant are typically two years, though the symptoms can be observed (but not usually diagnosed) by a GP or the patient him- or herself with a heart rate monitor to hand.
Sufferers are often dismissed as imagining symptoms or being anxious, so articles reinforcing this narrative does real harm. Trivialising POTS symptoms helps perpetuate views which create barriers to getting appropriate medical assessment (I was laughed at by a consultant and it delayed my son’s diagnosis by two years.)
I’ve been in patient groups for a decade and there has definitely been an increase in those arriving following HPV and Covid vaccines. It is also true that viral illness – especially with a high temperature – can trigger POTS. This is nothing new. The HPV vaccine however may well account for the significant increase in girls with POTS (though prior to this being rolled out, it was observed that more females than males are impacted – often females who have previously been athletic). Pro-vaccine consultants ask my (now adult) kids whether or not they have had vaccinations – they are definitely observing a link between certain vaccinations and POTS developing or worsening.
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I hope the author is writing from a safe house somewhere. I don’t think the pharma companies and their shrills in the media, politics and the bureaucracy are going to like this one bit.
Former female athletes being vulnerable? This says low blood pressure
Yup. Yesterday, temp around 24c, I decided I would be able to do my usual zumba class, which I’d ducked the week before when it was around 30c. I have low blood pressure (no jabs). Partway through the class, I came over a bit dizzy so I sat down for a minute.
I didn’t rush off to the doctor.
Who said you should? The symptoms have to be persistant for months prior to a diagnosis.
“ It has observable, measurable symptoms.”
These are called “signs” – symptoms are as reported by the individual but cannot be corroborated by observation – headache, for example.
Signs may be accompanied by symptoms – eg sore throat, but sometimes have no symptoms – abnormal blood pressure for example.
Heart rate can increase due to anxiety – anxious you’ve got the latest fashionable disease with an acronym. Or for other reasons.
The biggest disease is the medical industry turning everyone into a clinical case to be treated, and nobody must die, aided and abetted by the £harmaceutical £ndustry.
If we got rid of the NHS “free at the point of delivery” (if you can get it) medical service and people had to pay for themselves, I guarantee lots of diseases would miraculously disappear, and people’s lifestyles would change for the better.
Excellent, you saved me the bother of saying virtually the same thing. Not understanding the difference between symptoms and signs is at the root of much ‘medical journalism’.
The NHS is one of many protection rackets operating in our anarchic world.
Blood pooling, low blood volume, smaller red cells, greater vein elasticity is what the research is showing.
Yes PoTS is a thing, it seems, and females are massively over-represented among sufferers;
”Results: The final analysis included 4835 participants. POTS predominantly affects white (93%) females (94%) of childbearing age, with approximately half developing symptoms in adolescence (mode 14 years). POTS is a chronic multisystem disorder involving a broad array of symptoms, with many patients diagnosed with comorbidities in addition to POTS. POTS patients often experience lengthy delays [median (interquartile range) 24 (6–72) months] and misdiagnosis, but the diagnostic delay is improving. POTS patients can present with a myriad of symptoms most commonly including lightheadedness (99%), tachycardia (97%), presyncope (94%), headache (94%) and difficulty concentrating (94%).”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6790699/
I know it’s from the NIH and it is technically ‘a thing’ but that doesn’t mean in any way that it doesn’t have a massive psychological component. The rush to make a diagnosis stems from the extremely lucrative rush to ‘treat’.
Well I’m not sufficiently interested in this topic to do a meaningful delve of the literature, so perhaps our resident doctor can shed some light. I’m basically on the fence because I don’t want to write things off at first glance as being psychosomatic, but at the same time I’m very aware of the ever expanding psychiatrists’ bible: the DSM, and the ever present medical-industrial complex, which most definitely is obsessed with profit, is devoid of ethics and whose motto is ”a pill for every ill”. The worst people for them are the healthy people, the most profitable are ones they can reel in and make ‘customers for life’ out of them. Once they stick a diagnosis on you, that’s it. There’ll be a pharma product with your name on it.
I did briefly read something about way more people being diagnosed with this POTS after the Scamdemic, but the article was trying to paint it as ‘Covid’ being the cause, as opposed to the jabs, which I think is far more likely, but that still doesn’t explain why it’s disproportionately females suffering from POTS because plenty of men also got jabbed.
An indication, perhaps, that despite modern thinking, male and female biology is fundamentally different?
Males and females are not fundamentally different but there are differences. The key one is that males have only one X chromosome. The X chromosme is large and contains 5% of the genome. So males are 1000 genes short of a full set – it explains a great deal.
But in every female cell one of the X chromosomes is not expressed, this occurs at random so half express the X they received from their mother and the other half express the X they received from their father. The result is that every female is two slightly different individuals in the same body – this also explains a great deal.
But the important difference relates to heterozygous advantage. This is the observation that it is better to have two genes at a single locus that are slightly different than two that are the same. Slightly different genes can respond slightly differently when fighting infection. The females has heterozygous advantage on X but males don’t. The result is males have a disadvantage in fighting infection at all ages hence the observation that there are 3 male deaths at most ages for every two female deaths.
Females are less ikely to die of infection but are also much more likely to develop autoimmune disease following an infection that they have successfully overcome.
Males and females are not fundamentally different but there are differences. The key one is that males have only one X chromosome. The X chromosme is large and contains 5% of the genome. So males are 1000 genes short of a full set – it explains a great deal.
An obvious, alternate interpretation is that women (I’m intentionally not calling them females) have about 1000 more genes than necessary or sensible It could also be said that this explains a great deal.
NB: This is not a value judgement I’d subscribe to, just an attempt to point out how predjudices colour our thinking.
It’s very hard to get ongoing, appropriate treatment on the NHS due to limited knowledge among consultants and limited funding. The experience of genuine sufferers is not of that medics falling overthemselves to make a patient for life. Both covid and the covid vax can trigger PoTS. Any viral illness can, it’s nothing new. Research is also showing key features such as greater vein elasticity, smaller red blood cells and low blood volume – you are right to be cautious about assigning psychosomatic causes to symptoms.
POTS cannot be ruled out as a vaccine (HPV/DTaP/DPT/Comirnaty) injury simply because there’s zero (real) placebo-controlled trials.
Given that I once saw – and so wish I had kept – a list of over 300 fun things that can be triggered by the covid vaccine it would not surprise me if this was a another joy along with all the other things I have never heard of.
The clue to the pathogenesis of this new symptom complex is the females predominance and the age incidence. The latter rises to a peak in the late teenage or early adult years and then falls. These features are typical of an autoimmune process. A similar combnation is seen in anorexia nervosa, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome and anxiety neurosis. All these conditions have increased in frequency in the UK and the western world in general in the last 50 years.
There are trillions of bacteria that cover the epithelial surfaces of the body. They have evolved to occupy their specific niche, gaining energy from surafce epithelial secretions and out competing pathogenic bacteria. If the microbiota is sub-optimal then pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus get into the tissues and causes chronic inflammation. The inflammation contributes to a wide range of disease in both men and women. But women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases in which auto-antibodies develop and attack their own tissues.
The answer to this problem and many others is to drink milk daily and consume yoghurt daily. This is the only practical way in the Uk at present to maintain a supply of lactose fermenting bacteria to maintain the microbiome. It is the answer to the current epidemic of depression and anxiety occurring in the young and preventing them from working.
Don’t attack the young for the dreadful intellectual mistakes made over the last 50 years which have led to the false belief that we can improve on a diet tested ovder thousands of years.
I failed to add:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323406707_Optimise_the_microbial_flora_with_milk_and_yoghurt_to_prevent_disease
POTS rampant amongst the vaxxed.
One of my children included.
And yet many rush to discount the experiences of people suffering and fob them off, like: “It’s all in your head”, which is a real shame and smacks of arrogance, actually, because, unless one has any sort of medical training, how are any of us suddenly self-appointed experts and knowledgeable about such things?
I’d never be so insensitive as to assume somebody is imagining something or accuse them of “claiming victimhood”, as is the kneejerk reaction of some around here.