Achy Bones: Rheumatoid Arthritis

Let’s talk about rheumatoid arthritis.  Less than half the number of people get it than get gouty arthritis, which I talked about in my last post, but it’s a much bigger problem because it’s much less easily treated.  People over the years are probably going to become debilitated by it at some point in time.

We don’t know what causes rheumatoid arthritis.  There seems to be some genetic predispositions.  Caucasians get it more than other races.  There are certainly environmental factors.  We do know that women get it about 2-3 times as often as men.  We certainly know there are some immunological factors involved.  Why that is we don’t know.  There is certainly a sign of a deranged immune response where the body starts attacking itself.  There’s something in the synovial linings of the joint that the body identifies as wrong.  It frequently occurs after another infection, virus or bacterial infection.  The immune system, in fighting that infection or whatever it was, identifies a certain part of your body as the enemy.  There must be a structure in the joint surface or synovial lining that looks enough like that which the body starts attacking.   

It’s kind of the opposite of gouty arthritis.  You usually get a number of different joints involved at the same time.  It’s not immediate, rapidly developing pain like gout.  It’s usually much more insidious, slow, and over time there’s a little bit of ache and then a little bit more.  It will come and go.  We're all familiar with the phenomena of people being able to predict the weather by the arthritis or at least predicting when the weather changes.  That is simply the barometric pressure changing and it does make people with arthritis hurt.  

We’ve tried many things over the years to treat rheumatoid arthritis, from non-steroidal anti-inflammatories to injections of gold, even oral gold.  Gold creates an immune response.  It lowers the immune response as do a lot of heavy metals; lead, platinum, gold.  A number of heavy metals lower immune response.  That’s a fact.  In my cancer clinic in Atlanta that was one of the first things I looked at was heavy metal toxicity, to lower the burden on the immune system and allow it to begin to respond again with these patients.  

Immune alteration is a great big problem with rheumatoid arthritis.  Non-steroidals have been a main stay even though they do not alter the course of disease.  Then we try gold and platinum and things like that.  We’ve even tried cancer drugs; cyclosporine and other very toxic cancer drugs to try to decrease the inflammation.  We know that they damage the immune system and lower the immune system. That’s why we always check the white blood count when the patients get chemotherapy and they come back in.  Doctors are using that to try to lower the immune response in rheumatoid arthritis.  

Alternative medicine wise, the things that work we’ve mentioned for both of the other arthritis’; anti-inflammatory agents, digestive enzymes.  There’s not a whole lot in the alternative field that benefits this type of disease either.  We do, certainly, need to remember that in relationship to my work with The Healing Codes arthritis is related to both self-control and patience.  As it concerns emotional issues, we know that a lot of times these arthritis’ onset after an emotional event, after a sickness or a traumatic event.  We certainly want to look at the emotional issues related to that.  How can we get well if we haven’t changed that emotional issue?  

In my last post I mentioned fibromyalgia.  It deserves it’s own post, so next time we’ll talk about fibromyalgia.  

Achy Bones: Gout

Last week we talked about osteoarthritis because it affects the biggest group of arthritis sufferers.  About 20 million people in the U.S. have doctor-diagnosed arthritis.  If you look at statistics 5 years ago more people had arthritis than they do today.  You have to scratch your head over that.  Well, the CDC changed the criteria.  Back then it was people reporting joint pain and arthritis.  Today it has to be physician-diagnosed.  All of a sudden the numbers when way down from 50-60 million people to 20 million people. If you’re looking at numbers, according to what vintage your numbers, they will vary dramatically. 

This week and next we’re talking about the next two most prominent types of arthritis: gout and rheumatoid.  Rheumatoid gets our attention more because it’s so chronic and debilitating.  There are actually twice as many people who have gouty arthritis than rheumatoid.  I guess it’s a good thing since gout is more treatable.

Then there’s another group of people, nearly as many as have gout, and twice as many as have rheumatoid.  These are people that have fibromyalgia.  That’s been now kind of included in the arthritic “family” if you would.  By the way  90% of fibromyalgia patients are women.  Doctors were telling women just a few years back that they were hypochondriac or that it didn’t exist.  But we were, as a group of physicians, disrespecting women and ignoring their symptoms.  Much worse than that, impugning them by suggesting that it was only in their minds.  I ask forgiveness but I can’t speak for the rest of the medical community

Today we’re going to talk specifically about gouty arthritis.  Gouty arthritis is a situation in which uric acid builds up in the system and it forms crystals.  The solution becomes super-saturated with uric acid and so it crystallizes.  If you put too much sugar in your tea and keep putting more and more sugar in until it’s in solution while the tea is warm, when you put it in a refrigerator it can actually precipitate out.  The same reason honey goes to sugar after a while if it just sits there on your shelf.  It will crystallize.  That’s the type of situation we have here: crystallization.  

When there is too much uric acid in your system, your kidneys aren’t clearing enough.  That can be a genetic predisposition and can also be a situation where it’s environmental to some degree, in the sense of what we’re eating.  If we’re eating to many rich foods, too much meat with fat in it that can contribute to gout. Alcohol can also precipitate gout.  In the past it was known as the rich man’s disease, back as early as the 1500’s.  These were people who were able to afford lots of wine and ducks, fatty foods and things like that to eat.  

Gout is crystals that form in the joint space.  These little crystals are just like if you’ve ever gotten into fiberglass.  It itches.  It irritates.  This is kind of like fiberglass in your joints.  These pointy little crystals just irritate the heck out of the synovial lining.  As a result it becomes inflamed. 

Gouty arthritis usually occurs in one joint to begin with.  If you’ve got one joint that’s inflamed and hurting then the first question in your mind should be whether it’s gout.  The body demographics have changed over the years.  First-time attacks occurred 70-80% of the time in the great toe.  But in recent years that’s decreased.  We’re getting much more in the knees and elbows and hips these days than we did in times past.  It’s interesting to see that for centuries it stayed the same with the great toe being the fist joint to show up and then it’s changed a little bit.

Standard medical treatment for gout is non-steroidal anti-inflammatories that we talked about the other day.  Then some treatment drugs are Probenecid and sulfuric tyroione,  Allopurinol and things like that.  They do a fairly effective job of taking care of gout and keeping the uric acid out of the body.  Natural treatments include curamin, MSM, and digestive enzymes.  Digestive enzymes are interesting because if you put them in the bowel with food, they help digest food.  But if you take them on an empty stomach they go into the blood stream and are very anti-inflammatory there.  Black cherries as an old-wive’s treatment are known to help gouty patients.  We don’t know the mechanism because none of the big labs are going to put a couple million dollars into research in that.  It’s probably not patentable.  

Then just recently in the last year I’ve heard of a gentleman who stumbled across, just by the power of association with his own personal experience, that baking soda helped his gouty arthritis.  He mentioned it to other people who had gout.  They used it and so this has become another “ma and pa” treatment.  I just personally treated four or five patients with bicarbonate.  It’s worked on every one of them.  It’s an intriguing, new, alternative, very inexpensive treatment which you can find in any grocery store, probably in your own cabinet in the kitchen.  That’s interesting to see how that’s going to turn out and what percentage of people are benefiting over time. 

I'll talk early next week about a third type of arthritis: rheumatoid arthritis.

Achy Bones: Osteoarthritis

I thought we’d share some on arthritis today because it is a significant problem and probably the number one cause of disability in America.  About 50% of adults over the age of 65 have arthritis that impairs normal daily activities.  We’re talking over 20 million people with osteoarthritis and another 10 million with other kinds of arthritis.  It’s an incredibly disabling event that is happening to a large percentage of adult America.  I thought it would be interesting for us to gain a little knowledge and understanding of that area.

In truth, the term arthritis is kind of a catch-all for multiple problems.  In fact there are probably over 100 conditions that could cause arthritis.  It’s a highly diverse topic.  By and large probably 40 – 50% of all arthritis would fall under the category of osteoarthritis.  There are others: gouty arthritis, lupus arthritis, fibromyalgia, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.  There are all different kinds of arthritis.  I thought we might cover osteo today and maybe next week work on some of the other arthritises.  They are really different things completely.  What they have in common is that they just all manifest in the joints.  It looks like the same critter but there are a lot of different possibilities there.

So what is arthritis?  It’s a condition of the joints that is usually characterized by pain and stiffness with limited range of motion and swelling.  As I just mentioned there are a hundred different things that cause that.  It can involve, also, the immune system and even other organs in the body including the bowel and spleen and liver and other parts of the body and has significant implications for other parts of the body.  But when we think of the term arthritis we usually think of joints and joint pain.

Certainly the most common joints affected are our fingers.  Usually the knuckle joint first and then the next up.  These joints in our hands are the most commonly affected.  However, the ones that get us the worst are usually hips and knees.  Those are the big ones that wind up in surgery.  When you think of the economics of having a huge problem that you have to deal with you usually think of hips or knees, but by far and away the most common daily problem that we encounter is arthritis and osteoarthritis of the hands.

As far as male/female it’s usually about 50% of women, about 40% of men.  That may be due to calcium loss during pregnancy and things like that.  It could also be related to less exercise.  There are a lot of things we don’t know about it.  We have some statistical numbers, but that doesn’t necessarily relate to fact or reality of what is actually going on there.  You can take some guesses.  If women have it more than men, maybe it’s because of babies.  Maybe it’s because they aren’t as physically active.  Who knows?  We really don’t know the answers to those questions.

What’s going on in that joint when osteoarthritis occurs?  Normally is there is cartilage on the surfaces so that the bones don’t rub bone to bone.  Then you have a little sack around the joint called the bursa that holds fluid on there.  It’s kind of a lubricant on the two joints which are surfaced with cartilage.  That cartilage begins to break down.  Realize that cartilage doesn’t have any blood.  It has no nerves and it has no lymphatics.  It’s kind of a unique tissue in the body.  It grows slower than molasses.  It’s like brain cells.  They grow very slowly and reproduce very slowly.  It’s a different sort of situation that the muscles or other tissues of the body, even kidneys or liver or bowel because it grows so very slowly.  Cartilage is composed of about 95% water.

So those joints begin to get inflamed, whatever may be the cause of it, and there are lots of different causes.  Osteoarthritis begins to happen a lot of times even in your teenage years.  By the time you’re 50, half of us have some osteoarthritis.  By the time you’re 70 it’s almost universal.  

It’s interesting as you look at different other vertebrates in the animal kingdom. Most people might think you get arthritis because you’re walking and standing.  But whales and porpoises have arthritis.  They’re surrounded by water, that’s a pretty good cushion.  It’s interesting that the only two animals that don’t get arthritis are bats and tree sloths which hang upside down to sleep.  So let’s hear it for the inversion tables here.  I propose that we have a study.  Anyone who wants to enter my study to sleep upside down on an inversion table every night, we’ll publish a paper in about 10 years and tell whether that had an effect on you.  I’m just joking about that. But it would be interesting to see if people that use inversion tables daily have a little less arthritis.

Anyway, you’ve got this cartilage which has no nerves, no blood vessels, no lymphatics.  You’d think that trauma would have a lot to do with causing arthritis.  If trauma were a cause then long-distance runners would all have osteoarthritis.  They don’t.  They don’t get it at any different rate than the rest of us.  

There are only a couple of things that are known to prevent osteoarthritis.  One is weight control.  If you are over weight you should modify that and change that.  Exercise, you might think, would pound the cartilage, causing damage.  Actually this is beneficial because there are no blood vessels going to it.  The way it gets its nutrition is by compression and relaxation.  It kind of pumps the fluid of the joint in and out of the cartilage surfaces as you exercise.  That’s why you would think, okay, my joint is hurting, I should stop using it.  Instead, the exercise is beneficial to it because it pumps nutrients and oxygen into the cartilage surface.

Treatments – the common varieties such as acetaminophen, aspirin, and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are hugely and broadly used with some significant benefit.  There are also downsides to a lot of those.  The acetaminophen can harm the kidneys; the non-steroidal drugs may cause bleeding from the bowels.  

Natural things that are of benefit I would put fish oil right at the top of things I would do to keep my joints healthy and functional.  If you’ve got some osteoarthritis, certainly chondroiton sulfate and glucosamine are highly beneficial.  Curcumin is a known anti-inflammatory.  There are others such as nettle leaf.  And I certainly won’t forget MSM.  Those are good things that have benefit for osteoarthritis.  

We’ll talk about some of the other forms of arthritis next week and what we can do about those.

Preventing Cancer

Okay, last week we talked about some of the traditional cures you’ll find for cancer in the medical field, and a little about the effectiveness of those treatments. Now we’ll ask the question, what can I do to prevent cancer or maybe treat it more naturally? Again, let’s go back to the causes. We’ll start with the number one cause, emotional issues. I tell every patient that I have, every one that I ever advise, two primary things: you have to be living in forgiveness and living in love. Forgiveness is the greatest emotional issue of life. You might have heard myself and my friend Dr. Loyd both talk about that in the past through The Healing Codes. I encourage you to go and investigate more of that because forgiveness is the greatest issue of life. 

Unforgiveness simply ties you to that person you don’t forgive. It doesn’t hurt them at all. You’ve got to let it go and cut the rope. You’ve got to be living in forgiveness. The positive side of that is living in love. That restores the joy to your life, and happiness.  Happiness is not about stuff, it’s about where you’re living your life. Those are emotional issues. That all relates to cellular memory and the other things that Dr. Loyd and I love to talk about.

Hypoxia. If you’ll remember, we talked about low oxygen tension in the blood a few weeks ago. That’s a huge one. How do you get the oxygen tension up in your blood? By changing your pH. The way to do that is to eat alkaline-ash foods and drink alkaline water. Those are really important issues if you’re trying to prevent cancer or get better if you have it. You want your body PH to be alkaline. That allows oxygen to turn loose out there on the other end and oxygenate the tissues. If cells can just have oxygen they can work miracles as far as staying healthy and utilizing the energy and the resources that they’ve got.  

What are alkaline-ash foods? Basically that’s lots of vegetables, less meat, healthy fruits.  That’s it in one sentence or less. You’ve got to move the pH and shift that.  

Environmental toxins – I’ve mentioned heavy metals earlier. Unfortunately there are not many natural ways to get heavy metals out of our bodies. EDTA and DMPS, DMSA are FDA approved drugs. They remove metals very effectively from the body and they have virtually no side effects. This is one place where I’m just going to recommend drugs. If you have heavy metal toxicity, if you have a “silver” filling in your mouth then you have heavy metal toxicity. If you live in America and drink water that comes through our pipes and breathe the air that has metal in it and live in a city where everything is metallic, then you probably have enough heavy metals where you need to get some out of your system. It dumbs down the immune system and the immune system can’t deal with heavy metals very easily.  

There are all kinds of other environmental toxins that you want to decrease your exposure to those: pesticides, all kinds of chemicals. Wash your food or if you can afford it buy organic. If you can’t buy organic, at least wash your fruits and vegetables off with hydrogen peroxide or other detoxifiers and neutralizers that are designed for that.  

On the positive side you can be taking anti-oxidants. That’s spelled f-r-u-i-t usually: blueberries, blackberries, grapes, grapeseed extract, wine, all different kinds of fruit. You can help yourself out and buy a good anti-oxidant formula from your nutrition store that would have grapeseed extract in it, alpha-lipoic acid, vitamins C, vitamin E and other anti-oxidants. Those are very, very significant.  

If I had a choice and I could only take my vitamin pill every day or my anti-oxidant, I would probably choose my anti-oxidant. They are just huge. We have so many oxidizing things in our environment that anti-oxidants are very significant.  

The food, the way it’s grown and processed and delivered to us these days, have significantly less anti-oxidants in it than if you grow your own in the garden.  You may need a boost there from those.

Radiation. Well, the best way to probably avoid radiation is not to go to the doctor’s office and get X-rays. Let’s talk about testing here for a little bit. There are common uses of X-rays. There are radiation studies like PET scans and different uptake studies, and there are CT’s. These are all using radiation. There is also a test called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) with which you can see almost everything you can see on a CT (even better sometimes), that doesn’t have radiation.  There is also ultrasound. The point is, there are other ways to study things without radiation.

Stay out of sun beds, tanning beds and things like that. Stay out of the sun during solar flares. On the other hand, we probably should get 15-20 minutes of direct sun every day. It’s pretty healthy for you because you need your vitamin D3 which helps prevent cancer.  It’s very, very healthy for you. It’s the over exposure where we go out for an hour or two when we’ve been inside under the fluorescent lights all the rest of the week that is so damaging.

We’ve mentioned viruses as a cause of cancer. There’s just not a whole lot to do about viruses except to keep your immune system totally up to speed. Staying out of stress is probably the number one thing. Orally there are some things that are probably good for helping your immune system fight viruses.  These include the arabano dilactan, beta 1-3 glucans, things like that available at a nutrition store.  

Alternative medically there is hydrogen peroxide, ozone, ultraviolet blood irradiation that can help and silver may be an agent that may help with viruses.  

That’s a wrap on our talk on cancer.  I know I’ve dwelt on the topic for a while, but I wanted to share that with you. Hopefully it will be valuable information for you that will be of some practical benefit. It’s a huge subject and we could talk about it for hours.  There are books written about it inches thick. In comparison this is less than a thumbnail sketch, but there it is.