It always takes a while to get the dose balanced to you...everyone is different whether it be activity, diet, body weight, etc. I had to go weekly for a month and then every two weeks for two months to get it right, but seasonal activity differences make a difference, as does the seasonal diet change...our spinach and leaf lettuce are coming in heavily now, so they have to keep raising my dosage, but that is their job! Hang in there!

Reid is right, but it sounds like they could be a little more aggressive in getting your INR up. It means that you need a higher dosage. Everyone is different. Some people are maintained on as little as 2mg and some people have to take as much as 15mg a day. I think you mentioned in another post that they did just raise the dose. Hopefully your next check will be a little higher. I doubt that you will be at 2.0 though.

As far as other blood thinners...there is pradaxa. It is new, and does not require the lab monitoring of warfarin. It might be an option. It is also very expensive, so it may not be covered by your insurance. The other option is aspirin, and some people do take that instead of warfarin. That really depends on your risk factors and is very individual. If you are possibly going to have cardioversion to get back into normal rhythm warfarin is the protocol.

Try to be patient and don't give up on the warfarin yet. It is a nuisance sometimes because so many things can change your INR as Reid mentioned. And it is very dangerous if your INR goes sky high. It can cause serious hemorrhage if your blood takes a long time to clot. An INR of 2-3 is high enough to reduce your chance of forming a clot and having a stroke, but not so high to cause a major bleeding problem.

thanks so much , i am not at a7,5 mg for next few days

thanks you guys

It took me a year to get my Warfarin regulated because I eat a lot of vegetables and the vitimin K lowers it. I finally got it right now and I take 5 mg a day. Also you have to take this at night for best results. They don't tell you that. It takes a long time but now I go once a month and he sometimes adds 1/2 a pill a week to get it up higher. Depends a lot on the food you eat.

Hi Ray; I sent you this some days ago. Perhaps you didn't see the message, but I found a natural way to get rid of the afib.
------------------

o: ray2600
Sent : 5/8/11, 11:42 am
Subject: here is how I got rid of my afib
I'm copying what I wrote more than 3 years ago under this so you get an idea of what I found out about afib. Some afib is called Lone Afib and that basically means that the doctors have no idea why it happens. For a while I thought that was what I had until, from paying close attention to a lot of things ate and did, I (like many others on this site) discovered what triggered it and how to avoid that. In my case, I had developed an allergy to wheat at age 52 (which really surprised me) and I had vitamin deficiencies as well as heavy metal toxicity issues. Once I cleaned up all that (see below for the gory details) and got on a regular non-flush niacin basis (I take 1 gram every morning) I have no afib issues whatever. AND I got off the Rythmol completely (they had me taking 150mg tabs every 8 hours) so I take NO meds whatsoever.

See if anything below helps, or triggers an investigation avenue you both might want to look into. Good luck, email me (doug.lanz@shaw.ca) if you'd like further info on the vitamin therapy. I have an good article by Dr. Abram Hoffer (who also has some vids on YouTube). Doug.

______________________

I'm 57 now and this is how my afib got manageable with vitamins, how I cleansed my body from toxins, then cured the afib - without the heavy meds.

Here is what I wrote 8 months ago in my blog on this website it includes the doses I take, or used to take. Now I still take all the stuff, 7 days a week and Ive cut down on the non-flush niacin to 1000 mg and the same dosage for magnesium.

The only additional news is that to maximize my health (Ive had no afib issues) Im doing a heavy metal cleanse. Now, knowing what I do at this point, I say find yourself a good naturopath who uses kinesiology to do his diagnosis and treatment. The kinesiology is the key, dont go to one who does not use. If you want the actual paper Dr. Hoffer wrote about vitamins, email me at doug.lanz@shaw.ca and I'll send it to you. Dr. Hoffer died a few months ago, the world has lost one of its true pioneers in medicine. It was his idea about vitamins that set me on this path.

Good luck,




Do I have good news! I'm now, I think, totally cured - and it was a bio-electric method that a brilliant naturopath has that did it. It's going to take some writing for me to tell you how it was done, so here goes.

You may recall I wrote that 4 years ago, shortly after turning 52 and during a messy divorce (from a long marriage), I developed Afib. I got to the point that even the stress of even talking on the phone would send me into Afib. I went to the hospital, got the whole deal workup, Holter monitor, carotid artery scan, heart scan, brain scan, treadmill test and the Western medicine solution was to put on 150mg Rythmol every 8 hours. I read the side effects and decided I was not staying on that stuff. Did you know it changes the conductivity of your heart tissue? YIKES!! I was also told that it would only work for a while, then the medicine would need to get stronger, then that would have minimal effect, then do stronger yet, then some sort of invasive procedure would be needed, perhaps the ablation or something.

So I searched to find how to get off it the meds. I went to Western medicine doctors, naturopathic doctors, intuitive healers, acupuncture, Body Talk practitioners and others. I reasoned that Western medicine was not the only healing modality on the planet and that I was going to find whatever it takes to restore my health. The intuitive healer helped me identify that I had developed an allergy to wheat gluten products. The Western cardiac specialist had never heard of that. Never had it before (I could eat 2 pizzas, pasta, beer, go with 4 hrs sleep, cinnamon buns, tea, coffee - you name it) before then, but at the (approximate 52 year time and I had develped the afib, a pizza slice, slice of toast (which I used to just love for breakfast, and all the other triggers would send me into afib. The wheat gluten was obvious once the intuitive healer made the wheat / afib connection. What happens is that my adrenals react to the wheat gluten, they pump out adrenaline in excess quantities and the adrenaline triggers the afib. I watched what else triggered me and saw that alcohol, stress, coffee and other things would also trigger the afib. Sometimes only for a few to 30 seconds and I didn't need the pill, sometimes a long episode and after trying everything I could, cold baths, exercise, forced burping (that did work when I over ate), arms in cold water, laying still and meditating to do the big time relaxation and those didn't work, I'd reluctantly take a pill (Grrrrrrr). In my search I found Dr. Hoffer's advice about vitamins and especially niacin (the non-flush type). The vitamins made such total sense to me. Who on this planet gets the ideal nutrition. After 50 years or so, it makes sense that there could be some vitamin deficiency, and/or body toxic buildup that compromises one's health. I had the old amalgam fillings and when my blood was tested for mercury, it was high. I got the amalgam removed and did infrared saunas' to sweat out the heavy metals. The combination of vitamins I found solved me from having to take Rythmol every 8 hours, but I still had to have a "pill in my pocket" for those times that I pushed myself too far. Tried a little too much wheat, a beer or wine, not enough sleep, or too much stress otherwise which would trigger an episode of Afib that required me to use one dose of 150mg (sometimes a double dose 300 mg) of Rythmol to get my standard heart rhythm restored. I could go for a few months just fine, then sometimes when stressed (as above) as I have my own small company and client / job demands added up, I would need one or two a week.

Here is the vitamin regime I settled on and stayed with for the last 4 years:

4 capsules of 250mg Non-Flush niacin. Make sure it is non-flush or you will have "hot" flash problems big time. This is probably the single most important aid to take. You can't do with much less. I tried 1.5 grams for a while and that worked for about a year but found that going to the full 2 grams helped better.

4 capsules of 250mg magnesium (no analysis can tell you if you're deficient or not and many cases of Afib have been traced to this when biopsies are done after the fact).

60 mg of CoQ10. For heart health, there is nothing better (someone with more severe heart problems told me).
1000 iu vit C (for the water soluble antioxidants) 400 iu vit E (for the fat soluble antioxidants) A good multivitamin that has as many trace minerals as you can find.
The best B complex you can find. Allergic reactions are from your adrenal glands and this helps support them.


What I added for my personal case is:
Omega 3 oils, helps the joints and alleviates arthritis - if you have any. It's also good brain food.
Ginko Biloba. I used to get ocular migraines every 6 weeks for a 30min period. Now I get one only about 3 times a year.

The reason for this vitamin regimen is that there is no one on this planet that can say they are getting all they need from their diet and a lifetime of diet can leave the body deficient in areas you can't even guess about. Modern medicine can only detect some vitamin deficiencies. I've been on this for the last 4 years. When I skip for more than 2 days, I get super sensitive, like too little sleep will trigger afib.


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The bio electric feedback, with applied kinesiology (muscle testing) detection, treatment and cure.

So, I'm happily doing all the stuff above and managing quite well, knowing how far I can push and how to deal with it when I do push too hard and trigger an episode. I love butter tarts, the odd piece of pie and do have some sometimes. I also enjoy a beer from time to time, so I watched that and kept it to half a beer about 2 times a month. I could go for months without needing a pill and have perfectly normal health - just keep up the vitamins at least 5 days a week, sometimes 6 days a week, or even 7 if I felt like it.

I switched to a vegetarian diet in that I don't eat any kind of red meat or any "bird", no eggs, but I do eat seafood and cheese. Cleared the toxins out of my body, liver and colon cleanse, got the heavy metals out with numerous infrared sauna treatments (we bought one for the house) and stepped up my exercise. I do more tai chi and more biking, walking, etc. I get regular treatments from a very talented Body Talk practitioner who is working on clearing the past emotional injury type energies out of my body and auric fields and have been steadily improving, but I still had the sensitivities which triggered afib if I pushed my luck too far.

Then I heard about this naturopathic doctor in my area (Vancouver, BC, Canada) who has a reputation of being absolutely brilliant (Dr. Timothy Brown, in White Rock, BC), who has clients come as far away as LA to see him. He also had an open house the next weekend. My current spouse has some health issues who wanted to get help, (thyroid, energy, allergies, etc.), so we went to the open house. He has 4 or 5 doctors with different specialties working there. They really offer the full health assessment and restoration there. They also have an allergy specialist who has, what I think, is an amazing machine and technique. In the open house, one of the other resident Dr's, who specializes in allergies showed us the machine and discussed how it is applied. In essence, he said there are two kinds of allergies, those you are born with and those you develop. He can cure the ones you develop in life, but not the ones you are born with. Since I had done the toxin removal work, the vitamin restoration and other work, he said he'd demonstrate the technique on me. Here is how it went. I was put on my back and held my arms straight up, backs of my hands facing each other by about 4 inches. The machines is like a blood pressure wrap on your arms, but it is electric, not pressure. The machine is programmed with more than 100,000 bio signatures of alergines. With the different bio electrical signals applied and using applied kinesiology to test for weakness (strong adverse affect) or strength (no effect), he found it was not exactly the wheat gluten, but some other component in the wheat. The germ? Anyway, then he used the same machine to find out where the allergic reaction was affecting or stored. He told me, in my case, it was stored in the pericardium which is the sack of protective fluid around the heat. Did you know that different parts of your body store different things? See Barbara Anne Brenan's book, Healing Hands of Light as I mention above. Then, using another "counter-bio-signal" he activated that, used a combination of acupressure and breathing techniques to "release" the stored allergy.

I was instructed not to do much wheat for a day or two. That was 2 weeks ago.

Lately, I've had beer, pizzas, bread, you name it - no afib reaction. Frankly, I'm floored,as I thought I'd have this for the rest of my life.

Now I obviously don't know other's specific conditions or treatment needs - however, I always knew this could be beaten and I simply did not accept the Western medicine approach, there had to be some other way.

Hope this helps.