I have a question for everyone here: have your POIS symptoms, especially your cognitive symptoms, ever improved when you were sick with the flu/cold/other?
For me this is a "yes". It isn't often that I am sick though, so I havn't had the chance to observe it much. But most recently, this past Christmas holiday I caught a serious cold that lasted for 2+ weeks. It was partially my fault, because I was in the midst of treating my candida infection and went overboard with antifungals and probiotics, making me feel terrible and compromising my immune system. On top of that, I was surrounded by family who probably brought all sorts of germs with them.
I was sneezing and coughing and had a sore throat, but I was having the highest clarity of thought in recent memory. It lasted about a week after I stopped sneezing and coughing, and I returned to normal. Since I was in such a fervor to treat my candida, I immediately thought this was some great benefit of really conquering candida. I had dieted and treated myself for almost 3 months at that point, so I thought it was about time to see some great benefits.
Thing is now I have problems with candida again. I reintroduced foods according to the diet, and didn't have the normal gassiness and bloating I was having before. My biggest reason for treating candida was that I had developed what is called an intertrigo 3 years ago, which is a sore spot in the fold of my skin between my thigh and genitals. I washed it and cleaned it for over 2.5 years, and it never would go away. Finally, after reading some things about candida on POIS forums and asking my doc, he told me he was confident it was a fungal intertrigo. That intertrigo went away for the first time in 3 years in laste December, and I was happy because I knew I had treated it by attacking candida in my body.
But about 1 month ago, my symptoms started to show up again. I became gassy, bloated, and I started to feel the all to familiar irritation where my intertrigo used to be. My candida is still there, and it hasn't been treated.
So was this glorious 2 or so weeks of clarity of though really the result of treating candida? I'm not so sure now, because I'm beginning to realize how many times I've experienced a reduction in symptoms, especially cognitive symptoms, when I've been sick. I can think all the way back to early high school, when I already had POIS for 3 years, I came down with a cold and could finally understand what was going on in my mathematics class. In addition, I suffered from social anxiety terribly in high school, and in those sick times I remember being "on my game" for the first time in my life, making jokes and flirting with girls.
There are studies out there that have explored the idea that sickness can be beneficial to diseases. Jonathan Kipnis of the University of Virginia found that incapacitating mice's T cells made them perform poorly in navigating known mazes, in addition to a number of other cognitive tests:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/21/8180.abstractAlso, he and other scientists knocked out the immune signaling molecule interleukin-4 in mice, and found they displayed significant cognitive deficits:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20439540Kipnis dreamed up these studies when he found he could think more clearly during a fever.
There is a lot of research showing that fever helps in autism. In 1980, a viral infection spread through the ward housing autistic children at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in NYC. The children who contracted the virus improved, and regressed when their illness faded:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v313/n6002/abs/313426c0.htmlA questionnaire study by Curren et. all showed that the most difficult symptoms of autism - the irritability, hyperactivity, repetetive behavior, and lack of impulse control - all improved when body temperature went up during fever. After the fevers resolved, the children regressed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18055656So, I'd like to know. Have you experienced reduced symptoms, especially cognitive ones, from being sick? And, do you get sick less, the same, or more than others?
