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.  

Standard Treatments for Cancer & Why They May Not Work

We’re continuing from last week. We talked about cancer, what it is, a little bit about cancer cells and the causes of cancer. If you didn’t see that post I urge you to go back and look at it.  It will be very informative.

Let’s talk about how standard medicine treats cancer and then we will move on to other possibilities next time. There are currently three ways to treat cancer: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Let me say this very loud and clear. If you are going to get a standard medical cure for your cancer it should probably be surgery. That is: if the cancer is singular, if it is still one single tumor, if it hasn’t spread yet, and if they can go in and do a good “no touch” technique and remove the whole thing. You notice there are a lot of “if’s” in there.  If they can do all that and get it out, then you do have a chance of a standard medical cure, and that would be surgery.

The caveat to that is if they don’t get it all or if they biopsy it and run a needle through it cutting across lymphatics and veins and go through that tumor and back out again. Or they might not do good surgical technique when removing it. In either case, they have just spread it. That would be a problem. The point stands, however, that surgery would be the best standard medical cure, given the right conditions.

The next standard way of treating cancer is radiation. Radiation, which are X-Rays as I mentioned last week, causes cancer. It’s interesting – I guess you could say we’re treating fire with fire there. Radiation is frequently used to kill cancer cells. We also know that it does increase the risk of cancer of whatever you are radiating later. If you don’t kill all the cancer it increases the chance of having multiple lines of cancer cells instead of just one. There are some definite downsides for radiation. It also damages the immune system locally and to some degree more broadly. But it certainly damages the immune system less dramatically than chemo does.  

What I used radiation for in my alternative cancer clinic was mainly to de-bulk tumors. I didn’t use it a whole lot of times, but there is a new form called IMRT which helps you get less radiation. Radiation therapy is getting a little better. If you have an IMRT machine locally available it can be of benefit.

Chemotherapy works by damaging cells that are in the state of division. Whatever cells in your body are dividing it’s going to damage those cells. The theory behind chemo is that your cancer cells are going to be the most rapidly dividing cells in your body so it’s going to do more damage to them than it does to any other organ system or any other cells. Unfortunately that is not true for a lot of tumors. A lot of them are fairly slow growing.  The slower growing the less true that would be.  

The other problem there is the most naturally occurring rapid division in your body is from your immune cells. Therein lies a huge problem. If you ask a chemo doctor, “Doctor, could this chemo possibly ever kill all of the cancer cells?”  the answer will always, absolutely, 100% of the time be no. Chemo can never kill 100% of the cancer cells. You kind of scratch you head and go, “Well, okay, if chemo isn’t going to kill 100% of the cancer cells then what’s going to kill the rest of them?” The answer is your immune system. Then you go, “Okay, I thought chemo damaged my immune system. Isn’t that why you check the white blood count every time I come in before you give me another dose?” Therein lies the catch 22 with chemo. It damages the only thing that can possibly save your life. Unless your immune system steps up and kills the last 10 or 20 or 30% of the cancer cells you will not survive.

There are a few cancers, usually leukemias, lymphomas and blood type system cancers, and testicular cancer that there are some very effective chemos for. You can count those on your fingers. The others are poorly responsive to chemo in general. Outside of the handful of cancers that are very responsive it may not be a good way to go.

Next week, we’ll talk about some natural means of preventing and treating cancer. Stay tuned.