Gary Wolf and I have a post on Boing Boing today about how Dennis Mangan cured his mom’s Restless Legs Syndrome. I mentioned this accomplishment earlier. Mangan’s story is an example of what I call personal science — doing science yourself about something you care about.
More One comment on Boing Boing is that niacin is also known as Vitamin B3 and if we searched “restless legs syndrome AND Vitamin B3″ we’d get lots of hits. I tried that search and got zero hits.
I used to have a hard time with restless feelings in my legs. I found cutting out caffeine after 4pm and stretching when the feeling kicked in (touching toes with straight legs, more or less) helped a lot for me. My dad has trouble with restless legs, and I don’t think he’s found leg stretches help much for him.
I read through the comments, and as usual you had the vitamin-scaremongers out in force.
Almost no one dies from vitamin toxicity. Wikipedia: “In 2008 there were no deaths reported from vitamin overdose,[7] as has been the case for 17 of the last 25 reporting-years.[8]. Deaths from eating laundry products typically produce more deaths than vitamin poisoning.”
I have been telling people for 30 years that some supplements work for some people for some things; some supplements do nothing for some people with some conditions; and some supplements are harmful to some people with some conditions.
The only way to find out is to try them, self-experiment, and learn to distinguish placebo effects.
Speaking of self-experimentation, I just got a blood sugar monitor, which seems to be kind of a fad among low-carb people these days. But it’s really fascinating to see how your blood sugar reacts to certain foods. If you’re into self-experimentation, I highly recommend it. It’s not only interesting, blood sugar is one of the more important things to monitor for your long-term health.
If a psychiatric patient is restless because of a medicine (like Abilify), a psychiatrist might prescribe propranolol (Inderal). Propranolol (generic name) is also used for other things, such as performance anxiety.
Hi Seth, thanks for writing about it; hopefully this will help some people. When I wrote a short piece on my blog about my mother having success with niacin, it was noticed by Bruce Charlton, a regular reader of my blog and then the editor of the Medical Hypotheses. The journal will be familiar to most of your readers as you’ve discussed it here, and is (or was) dedicated to publishing “radical ideas”. Dr. Charlton invited me to write a letter for his journal about my and my mother’s experience, so I did. So he deserves a lot of credit for recognizing that this had some significance.
Unfortunately, Bruce’s penchant for publishing radical ideas proved too much for certain sectors of the scientific/medical establishment, and he was sacked from his job one week ago, on May 11.
And you, Seth, of course, have been pretty enthusiastic about it since you learned of it; kudos for your article.
Interesting post! I found out that taking promethazine hydrochloride (an anti-nausea drug under the name of Phenergan) for migraine-induced nausea or airsickness gives me a bad case of something that sounds very similar to RLS while it’s in my system. (Found this out the hard way after taking Phenergan on a cross-country flight).
Next time I have to take it (thankfully only once every month or two) I’ll supplement with some niacin and see if it helps. Who knows?