"One of every six children in America suffers from problems such as autism, aggression, dyslexia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder."
US News & World Report June 19, 2000

"In California, reported cases of autism rose 210 percent, from 3,864 to 11,995, between 1987 and 1998."
US News & World Report June 19, 2000

"In New York, the number of children with learning disabilities jumped 55 percent, from 132,000 to 204,000 between 1983 and 1996."
US News & World Report June 19, 2000

   A parent can ignore a child's unexplained tiredness only at peril. To blame a teenager's muscle pain (myalgia) on hormones is often a serious mistake. For a doctor to dismiss tired children and teenagers in pain simply because lab tests are negative is a grave error.
    Unexplained tiredness is oxygen deprivation in brain and other tissues. Muscle pain is oxygen deficiency in muscles. Those are the simple facts about tired children and teenagers in pain.

The Bad News and the Good News
   The bad news is that there is an epidemic of fatigue and muscle pain (myalgia) in children and teenagers. Those two epidemics are spreading primarily because of damage to oxygen enzymes caused by poor nutrition, sugar overload, antibiotic abuse, stress, and exposure to synthetic chemicals. I call the affected children and teenagers human canaries, because they are telling us something important about the shape of things to come. What poisons them eventually will poison others.
    The good news is that with proper treatment, almost all such young persons regain their health when their dysfunctional oxygen metabolism is normalized. Those canaries get better sooner than adults with fatigue and myalgia, because their oxygen enzymes can regenerate quickly when the underlying causes are corrected.

The Faces of Human Canaries
   Below, I relate the study of a child canary as told by her mother, from my forthcoming book, Canary Two: Oxygen and Fibromyalgia:

I told Karen's first pediatrician that she sleeps all the time and her whole body aches. The pediatrician replied, "Take it from me. I'm a mother. Karen is eleven now. She will grow out of it. Give her some Tylenol." Months later, she changed her mind and told us that Karen was making herself sick and that we should take her to a psychiatrist. Several months later, Karen's headaches became more frequent and we saw two more pediatricians. The same story. They had no clue to what made our daughter sick.

Then Karen had episodes of dizziness and she passed out a few times. Her pediatrician referred us to a pediatric cardiologist. The cardiologist ordered a tilt-table test that turned out to be positive. He prescribed Florinef for six months. Initially we thought the steroid drug was helping, but that proved to be temporary. Karen's situation continued to get worse. She had abdominal cramps, cold hands and feet, and blurred vision. The eye symptoms really bothered her because she couldn't read for periods of time any more.

We saw yet another pediatrician. The fourth pediatrician diagnosed chronic fatigue and said that it is something Karen had to live with and we had to cope with. And that there was no treatment for that, however she might get better on her own.

Jozan Plaza, a 45-year-old Alabama woman, visited Chicago recently to have a part of the back of her skull drilled off. Was this a good idea? Ms. Plaza is among the roughly eight million Americans diagnosed with a condition called fibromyalgia syndrome, which involves widespread muscle pain, sleeplessness, fatigue, and depression....For about $30,000 a case, they are drilling and snipping away bone from the backs of people's skulls and spines to "decompress" their brains, spinal cords and central nervous systems.

Oxidative Coagulopathy and Lymphopathy
   Oxidative coagulpathy (co-ag-u-lop-athy) is a term for formation of microscopic blood clots in the circulating blood that is readily seen with a high-resolution microscope. Lymphopathy (lym-phop-athy) is a term for formation of microscopic clots in lymph, the pale white fluid that flows in lymphatic channels. Stagnation of oxidized (and toxic) blood and lymph in tissues causes tiredness and pain in tissues.

Muscle pain is oxygen deprivation. That is the simple fact of muscle pain, with or without fibromyalgia.
   When a leg muscle cramps and wakes a person with intense pain, that is local oxygen deprivation in leg muscles. When a senior citizen suffers from fibromyalgia and hurts everywhere, that is systemic oxygen deprivation in muscles everywhere. My colleagues at the Institute and I see many senior citizens who suffer muscle pain in some areas for months or years before developing full-scale fibromyalgia.
    What causes oxygen deprivation in fibromyalgia? That story always begins either in the head or in the bowel. In the head, it is stress, anger, or confused demands for love. In the bowel, it is battering of the bowel ecosystem with unsuspected food intolerance, sugar overload, antibiotics, undiagnosed mold (yeast) allergy or overgrowth, and toxic synthetic chemicals. All of those factors lead, directly or indirectly, to dysfunctional oxygen metabolism (DOM).
    Next, toxins and microbes spill into the blood and cause damage to blood cells and formation of microscopic clots (microclots) and microscopic plaques (microplaques). I call those changes oxidative coagulopathy (OC).2 "Such microclots and microplaques not only clog tiny blood vessels, but also poison oxygen enzymes. That further increases the degree of DOM. Next, the problems in the bowel and blood ecosystems spread to the liver, which normally detoxifies toxins for the whole body. The liver fails to completely neutralize the toxin overload and further worsens the degree of dysfunctional oxygen metabolism.
  Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition with three main symptoms: (1) persistent muscle pain (myalgia) with painful spots in soft tissues (trigger points); (2) disabling pain; and (3) brain fog (and related disorders of mood, memory and mentation). Although victims of early and mild cases of fibromyalgia may not suffer from one or two of the three core symptoms, persons with advanced disorder do so in all cases. Other symptoms include flu-like symptoms of malaise, aching joints, and abdominal bloating and cramps; bowel irregularities; non restorative sleep; PMS symptoms and menstrual irregularities in women; cold sensitivity; and depression.
    If you have read articles about chronic fatigue syndrome CFS written by doctors who care for a large number of patients with that syndrome, you know that muscle pain, fatigue and brain fog are also the three main symptoms of (CFS). This is why I consider FM and CFS twin sisters. In 1993, I published an article in the Journal of Advancement of Medicine (1993;6:83-96) in which I proposed that CFS is caused by accelerated oxidative injury to human enzyme systems. Oxidation is the process of decay, a loss of energy (electrons). Enzymes are natural substances that facilitate life processes in the body. In 1994, I published The Canary and Chronic Fatigue and presented extensive evidence to support my theory. Since then, hundreds of medical reports have validated my theory.
  What is the proof of my view that fibromyalgia symptoms are called by dysfunctional oxygen metabolism? The simplest and most direct way to prove that is microscopic examination of a drop of blood of the patient performed with a special high-resolution phase-contrast microscope with darkfield optics. Blood samples of FM and CFS patients show the abnormalities listed above. Another way to prove the presence of dysfunctional oxygen metabolism is to perform a test for 24-hour urinary organic acids. For example, increased amounts of lactic, glyceric, pyruvic, and hydroxybutyric acids in the urine clearly indicate dysfunctional oxygen metabolism.