To get rid of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib, AF) it is, in my eyes, very necessary and helpful to slip into the role of a medical detective.
In that new role I needed to gather as much indications and evidence as possible to find out “who” or what is suspicious in really causing my AFib condition.
To be honest: Everybody is unique and no one else will do this detective work for you if you will not.
Note: A doctor or therapist can/should of course support his patient in this detective work, like Mr. Watson supported Sherlock Holmes, but as I have experienced it this support is mostly very limited and as long as there is no “out of the box solution” the Western medical system will be not very helpful in providing much useful information or even a cure for someones specific AFib. Actually, in 2020, I also sadly don’t see a real cure coming soon from that direction, only “quick fixes” with a couple of high risks and harmful sideeffects. Another point is, as I have experienced it myself, that any specialist with relevant knowledge in this field of expertise, might bill you 120€/$ an hour as a bottom line and this is not affordable over time for the most people like me.
But being a detective ourself everybody can start his/her own investigation immediately (without any cash flow problems) and at least might be able to build up a senseful causal chain step by step putting the AFib puzzle together.
One very helpful method to do this puzzle piece by piece in my experience is to write an AFib diary.
In this diary I recommend to write all the important parameters that might be related to everyones’s own specific AFib condition whenever he or she gets into an episode.
This diary can help much to find out what probably has triggered the AFib, what keeps it stable and if there have been any improvements achieved over time or not.
In my personal AFib Diary for example I put the following parameters whenever I get into an episode:
- Date and Time (of AFib episode)
- Duration
- Intensity (easy, medium, heavy)
- Nutrition today
- Medication (if taken)
- Possible trigger today
(What have I done shortly before it started that might have caused the episode? ) - Possible trigger yesterday
(What have I done yesterday that might have caused the episode?) - Stopped by “BackToSinus”-Procedure?
(After how many intervals/trials?) - Body weight
Of course you can put some more parameters into your own diary, if you think it is helpful for your detective work.
Whenever a change to the AFib strategy (or lifestyle) has been done, like e.g. putting a “bann” on supermarket food, changing/reducing a medication plan etc. it is important to make a comment with a timestamp to the diary, because this helps much later on to see the improvements that have been achieved related to a specific behavior change.
Note: To get more data to work with, it might be senseful to also list some of the parameters every day (without having an episode) e.g. body weight, blood pressure etc..
After some time, when more and more data has been collected, this diary can be very helpful for identifying “triggers” of the upcoming episodes.
Maybe it will be possible to recognize something like:
- Mostly always after I drank a bottle of red wine I got into an episode.
- Whenever I ate at the cantine (a special meal) with specific artifical flavors (MST?) one or two hours later I got an episode.
- When I have had much stress, I always get an episode one day / hour later
- …
Another benefit is that improvements can be seen easily like (only examples):
- Since I do Yoga, I have x% (in average) less episodes per month.
- After loosing ten kilos of body weight my episodes have decreased for x% (in average) per month.
- Since I take e. g. magnesium citrate, etc. frequently I have spent x% (in average) less time being in AFib episodes per month, because my heart converts back to sinus rhythm quicker.
- …
At least of course the plan is not just only to get to know (and avoid) the AFib triggers, the plan is to get rid of AFib, but it is important to see this diary as a first step.
The diary is a very helpful document indicating if there is any progress in our healing process and analyising the collected data can point the way into the right direction for the future.
Note: Based on that diary there is a much better basis for a discussion together with a doctor/therapist/healer etc. about what kind of support is really needed to make some real progress.
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Keywords: AFib Diary, Atrial Fibrillation, AFib, Curing AFib, Curing AFib naturally, Medical Detective
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