POTS is a debilitating disease. It causes significant fatigue, fainting, or feeling faint, nausea, sweating, and the stress of POTS causes inflammation, lack of sleep – which causes more stress, more inflammation, more nerve symptoms, tingling, chronic pain.

My patient sitting with me says it is like a crippling migraine without a headache. My body doesn’t work. Pick up something heavy, and the arm goes numb. Affects my quality of life tremendously. I want to exercise, but then I get purple legs, pain, nausea, dizziness.

One of the many stress responses in the Limbic System is the secretion of ADH – Anti-diuretic hormone – meant to protect your body from blood loss. The Limbic system does NOT see the difference between physical danger (stress) or emotional danger (stress) or POTS (stress on the body ) and it reacts as if you are losing blood volume.

You develop thirst. Drink too much. Don’t excrete enough urine. Then you get sick. Nausea. Stop drinking because you are sick. So you use up the volume and then when that is done, the ADH rises again and we are back in the same cycle.

STOP DRINKING MORE THAN MAXIMUM 8 GLASSES OF LIQUID PER DAY. You will be thirsty. Suck on a lemon – life is a lemon anyway. Don’t use liquid salt or electrolyte drinks – makes it worse. Use salt tablet. Soy sauce and Marmite spread are useful.

Low impact exercise – small amounts 5 – 10 minutes frequently in the day. Learn pacing. Almost certainly your expectations will be higher than your body can manage because your body is sicker than you want to believe. Sorry – depression.

Improvement can happy with working on Limbic system. Try this link Ways to Calm Down – It may help.

Try and see if this helps. Really we are at a loss to treat this condition. I hope this helps a bit.

Good Luck

Judy