Glenn Beck reveals he's been battling serious health problems for years
A teary-eyed Glenn Beck revealed on Monday that he's been battling a series of serious neurological health problems for nearly five years.
"It has baffled some of the best doctors in the world," Beck told viewers of the Blaze, the network he founded in 2011. "It has frightened me and my family, as we didn't know what was happening."
The 50-year-old former Fox News host described in detail the debilitating symptoms few people knew he had — including vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems, memory loss, and intense pain that sometimes left him in "a seizurelike state."
"While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew (God bless them), my executive producer Tiffany and our director, Sarah, worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off me," Beck said. "We didn't know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet, or arms and legs, would feel like someone had just crushed them, or set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them."
He was even tested for traumatic brain injury by doctors because he felt he was "functioning at about the bottom 10 percent."
“I was told at the time that I would have somewhere between 5 and 10 years before I would no longer be able to function,” Beck said. “I was by doctors to go home and take a year off ... and enjoy the days with my children."
“I asked God: ‘Am I done? Can I put my sword down now?’ The answer was always ‘No,’” Beck recalled.
Eventually, doctors in Texas diagnosed Beck with an autoimmune disorder and adrenal fatigue, among other ailments.
"Me never having to sleep was finally understandable," he explained. "The last sign of adrenal failure is a hyperextension of your adrenal glands. In other words, I didn't need to sleep. I could've been lifting cars during my time at Fox."
Seated next to his wife, Tania, Beck said he decided to reveal his health issues now because he didn't want to hide them from his audience any longer.
"No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy," he said. "But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”
After months of hormone treatments, physical therapy and changes to his diet, he says he's on the road to recovery.
“Over the last 10 months, I did all kinds of tests and therapies, which included everything from electric stimulation to weird gyroscope tests like the astronauts use where they’re flipping you around,” Beck said. “After months of treatment and completely changing the way I eat, sleep, work and live, along with ongoing hormone treatment and intensive physical therapy, I have reversed the process. Some of the physical scars will be with me for the rest of my life ... but my brain is back online in a big way.”
