“Rush Limbaugh says he does the show with half his brain tied behind his back,” Glenn Beck said. “With me, it’s actually been true. But now, it’s back online.”

Glenn Beck is not universally loved. The man has churned out some of the most derided theories and accusations during his days at Fox News and in his own productions.

These include:

– Suspicions that Google is spying on conservatives, including him, for the “U.S. Government”.

– The existence of “System X” in public schools, which includes sensors in students’ desks and MRI machines that gather information to allow people to be controlled by one political party.

– The “government coverup” of the involvement of a “Saudi national” in the Boston Marathon bombing.

– The U.S. government is seizing land through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to set up a new “land-backed” currency in America.

– There are many more. And these kinds of things finally drove Fox News to sack Beck in 2011 to salvage their deteriorating reputation as a news agency.

Lots of people roll their eyes and dismiss Beck nowadays. But the man has now come forward with a tale that even his most ardent opponent should pause before making light of.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck said on his online show. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck had a condition that took years to diagnose and decipher. It was not only incredibly painful, it sometimes rendered him immobile.

“Most afternoons my hands would start to shake, or my hands and feet began to curl and eventually — if I didn’t stop and rest, I began to curl into a fetal position,” Beck said. “This has baffled some of the best doctors in the world. It has frightened me and my family, and I didn’t know what was happening.”

The condition not only affected him physically, but severely debilitated his memory. Oddly, it also enabled him to function on very little sleep each night. But the odd mix of symptoms was crumpling him. Beck considered abandoning his career and giving attention to his family, fearing that his death was approaching quickly.

“We were all in the kitchen as a family,” he recounted, “and I had an attack. … I saw the faces of my children, and the idea that I would someday not remember them, nor would I remember my soon-to-be-born grandchild, hit me like a bag of bricks. And we looked at each other and I asked, ‘What am I doing? Maybe we should all move up to the mountains and spend all the time I have left together.’”

Beck eventually found doctors who were able to get to the root of his condition.

“After a few short visits, they found that I had several things going on, from an autoimmune disorder to adrenal fatigue. They also found the connection to everything that was going on, and for the first time gave us hope that we could reboot my system — not just stop it, but reverse things,” Beck said. “Me never having to sleep was finally understandable. The last sign of adrenal failure is a hyperextension of your adrenal glands. In other words, I didn’t need sleep.”

“But now that I had blown out my system, all I could do is sleep,” Beck continued. “My immune system was looking at these natural hormones as an infection and so my body was trying to kill its most basic functions.”

The good news — and it is good news when anyone finds a way out of their suffering, whether you like or agree with them or not — is that Beck is improving.

Beck now declares, “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.”