An unusual path to brain damage:
In the news these last few days have been versions of a story about a woman who suffered brain damage from a detox diet she was on. The British woman, Dawn Page, was taking a nutritionist’s advice and ingesting large amounts of water while cutting back on salt intake.
The resulting sodium deficiency caused an epileptic fit that lead to permanent brain damage. Page was given a settlement by the nutritionist’s insurance company, but that didn’t exactly make up for the memory damage, speech difficulties and loss of concentration that Page now lives with.
This story is a good example of how important it is to make sure you are taking advice from a registered and thoroughly trained professional. Not only that, but following up someone’s advice with research of your own to make sure that there is some validity to the information is equally important.
It’s easy for people to assume that because someone lables themselves a nutritionist or doctor or herbalist, etc., that they are automatically trustworthy. In our culture we tend to take “professionals” on faith, figuring that they wouldn’t lie to us as they are in the health profession.
One thing to remember is that sometimes they aren’t lying, such as seemed to be the case with Page’s nutritionist, Barbara Nash. From all accounts, Nash believed what she was selling and most likely it was ignorance on her part that caused her to prescribe a detox program that was so dangerous. This is why doing your own research to back up what you have been told is so important.