F. Smeath
I doubt this suggestion will prove to have anything to do with your nephew's problem (and please accept my sympathy--that's a tough row to hoe for such a young person), but you do need to eliminate any DENTAL factors from the picture. Do a little checklist of related items: has there been dental work of any kind just before the onset of his symptoms (especially including drilling, capping, crowning, root canal, etc.)? Has there been any injury that included mouth/teeth/jaw damage? Has he had an ear infection that made his teeth or jaw ache as well? If your nephew has silver fillings and sustained any kind of specific injury or infection to his mouth recently, or the addition of new fillings or especially the insertion of a gold crown next to silver fillings, it is possible for an allergy-type reaction to occur, overwhelming the body with joint pain, muscle weakness, dizziness, fuzzy vision, oversensitivity to light, etc. All the causal factors have to be present, so it is not your most likely instigator, but it COULD happen (and you can't identify it by MRI or CAT scan, etc.). In 1992-93 I went through a 9 month whole-body ordeal because of 1 gold crown inserted between 2 silver fillings: I can relate, therefore, to being attacked by something complete unknown (it took 11 months to pin down the cause in my case). Your nephew's problems are probably coming from a different source than this, but, to help pinpoint the problem, you should make sure that there is no dental connection. (The damage appears to come from amalgam and/or other metals leaching into the bloodstream: oxygen is cut off and a symptom overload can result. If you do see evidence of some kind of dental connection or activity around the time of the onset of his symptoms, feel free to e-mail me. If there's clearly no such connection, please accept my sincerest wishes that a cause can be found soon.