I needed to disable self sign-ups because I’ve been getting too many spam-type accounts. Thanks.
Chris's progress
I agree that I also wonder about the safety of plasma donations. Gosh I'm so jaded. My grandfather who lived to mid-nineties gave whole blood.
I admit I did wonder this as well when giving plasma last time, would a whole blood donation be quicker and do the same thing. But I have never had serious side effects from giving plasma, and the benefits have always been noticeable. One day on from my first plasma draw in months I feel amazing, so much better than all last month. And I have never tested high for iron, maybe I am just lucky, but my diet is primarily grass fed red meat rich in iron, so maybe that concern is overblown.
I am more concerned about the externalities around giving plasma than the plasma versus whole blood thing tbh. The plasma center is 20 minutes from home with no traffic and in a really dangerous neighborhood. The process takes, on my best day, 90 minutes in the clinic in and out the door. The employees sometimes give bad sticks. The money I get for plasma doesn't seem worth the hassle.
So I will look into plasma and blood near me and will probably try whole blood in the future out of curiosity if nothing else. But I don't anticipate it being a silver bullet, or plasma draws being seriously bad. Remember we are on Grants forum in the first place, and he donated plasma 40 times and is in great health, the model we are all following to some extent or another.
Quite interesting I just happened upon this right after writing my above post. Apparently when testing firefighters who have high toxin loads in the body they found that regular blood donators had less, but plasma donators had three times less than the blood donators.
Now I'm not saying petrochemicals are the same as VA, or VA binds in the plasma more than the whole blood, but it's worth noting that no one says the opposite here. I'd like some more explanation on where the VA actually is in the blood, what part of the blood contains more. I can't recall Grant specifying that but maybe it's in the archives of his blog posts.