There is now a tab at the top of this page called, “Medical Headlines-Translated,” that will give some balance to those Big Stories from medical journals and the TV news that sometimes scare us or jolt us into action that may – or may not – be unwarranted. This feature gives my analysis and opinion of the merits of the research in terms that I hope are useful for you.
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My friend, an anti-war and anti-establishment activist, was a charter member of the drugged culture of the 1960s and 1970s when she was in high school and college. She used hallucinogens like LSD and hosted parties where her friends raided prescription drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, mixed them together in a big bowl, and ingested handfuls at a time. Prim and horrified in equal parts, my words tumbled out as if they belonged to someone else: “How could you do that to your body?” Decades later, her reply still echoes in my mind: “Well,” she said, “most of us survived.” The breadth and depth of the drug culture that surrounds us today puts to shame the adolescent excesses of those years. If you watch the evening news you can’t easily escape the rafts of billion dollar commercials selling the latest wonder drugs for diseases, some of which, like ‘restless leg syndrome,’ are concocted by Big Pharma strictly to sell their products by making you believe you have a problem. Somewhere along the line during my years working in public health, I realized that pharmaceutical companies were not in business to do their customers any favors. Their only priorities are their bottom line, their shareholder dividends and their CEO compensation. The public good, meaning your health, doesn’t seem to be on their radar screen. The list of drugs approved by the FDA, often under veiled threats from the industry, which are later withdrawn from the market after a suitable number of deaths and massive objections from drug makers, is long. Sometimes Big Pharma manages to wrangle the drug back onto the market. Here is a list, in chronological order, of drugs removed from the market which had originally been approved for sale in the U.S by the FDA. (If this web address doesn’t show up as a link, you can cut and paste it into your browser.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs Note the rapid escalation after the turn of the 21st century, which reflects Big Pharma’s increasing emphasis on drugs that will earn them big bucks quickly. The fines they may receive for hiding crucial information from clinical trials and the awards they pay to victims and their families after lawsuits, are negligible compared to their profits. Whether or not the drug is withdrawn is virtually immaterial to them, if not to their targets. A more concise list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Withdrawn_drugs How many of them did you or your family members take? Here is another heart-stopping memo to a senate subcommittee explaining that drugs belatedly found to be dangerous enough to be banned are mainly prescribed to women. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01286r.pdf And one recently banned in Britain: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1246043/As-weight-loss-drug-withdrawn-health-fears-diet-pills-good-true.html Banned or not, drugs change our bodies, our metabolism, our health and well being and are everywhere, all the time. Sometimes it seems that our kids are drugged with Ritalin as soon as they show signs of being normal kids – sometimes against the wishes of their parents; we take Detrol to control inconvenient urges to pee instead of trusting our bodies to respond to the reasonable requests of our minds; Sally Field is paid big bucks to hawk an osteoporosis drug with terrible side effects, about which she is silent; Viagra will soon be targeted at women, a new profit center that the manufacturer, Pfizer, Inc, sees as a lucrative untapped market. Research tells us that prescription drugs work effectively only about one-third of the time. Researchers also believe that side effects may be understated by a factor of 10 and that most pharmaceuticals are much more toxic than reports indicate because people often fail to connect their declining health with the meds their doctors prescribed. The massive problems within the pharmaceutical/medical industry are discussed in a number of well researched and well written books, some of which I’ve listed at the end of this soapbox. We who have arthritis are among the major users of drugs, both over the counter and by prescription, and we are major marketing targets for horrendously costly meds that may seem effective in the short run but are, without question, unsafe and even deadly in the long run. As many prescription drug users with rheumatoid arthritis can attest, we can easily end up in worse shape than before we started taking the drug that was supposed to heal us. And that is the reason for this blog. None of us has to settle for prescription drugs so dangerous they may kill us when there is an extremely effective and cost free alternative: dietary changes. Next time: NSAIDS and Biologics
My ability to control the condition did not happen overnight. It was a matter of trial and error and it was complicated by the gray areas when all that I wanted was simple black and white: To know if a food was either OK for me or if it was not. No such luck. What I got instead were some foods that were absolute no’s; some foods that I could tolerate in very small quantities everyday; and some that I could eat without regret no more than once every 3-4 days. I became aware almost immediately that it was crucial to my well-being that I keep a daily, detailed food diary. I wrote down everything that went into my mouth in roughly the order that I had eaten it. I was taking on an allergy cycle that was much too complicated for me to track in my head. Continue reading Part 2, continued. My Story: Learning to Live with Rheumatoid Arthritis (Part 1 is published under the title “Diagnosis RA” in this blog.) At the time that I was diagnosed with RA in late 1993 the disease had not set in with the vengeance that it would soon show. I saw a rheumatologist because I had started waking up with achy joints and I had a family history. Then there was the low grade fever, the nausea and weight loss, the bottomless fatigue, and the hours of morning stiffness that I had endured for several months but which I didn’t then connect with the achy joints. Every morning I took a couple of aspirin and it all went away, except for the endless fatigue, until the next day when I’d start over again. The lab results jolted me out of my bubble and into reality. According to secrets discovered in my blood, I was very sick. My RH Factor, regarded as a sure indicator of the severity of Rheumatoid Arthritis, was one of the highest my doctor had ever seen, she told me later. The pity that I saw in her eyes that day chilled me far more than the diagnosis had. It told me that I was destined for a rapid deterioration and disability. Continue reading Part 2 – My Story: Learning to Live with Rheumatoid Arthritis The diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis may be life-altering, but it is not an excuse to throw in the towel and crawl under the covers. In fact, our lives remain in our hands, just like it always was. What we face is a challenge, not a catastrophe, and how we decide to face it can have a major effect on our lives from this point forward. I’d like to inspire you with your ability to control your future. Probably thousands of those affected with RA and other autoimmune diseases have lived normal, functioning lives because they learned to do exactly that. Now it’s your turn. Let me begin by telling you what you won’t find on this site.
Using food and our own wits to control Rheumatoid Arthritis can be a new, different, even scary idea since we have learned since before we can remember to trust the experts, the doctors we see, and not ourselves and our own intuition. Despite the many well meaning, generous physicians to whom we entrust our health, the sad truth is they know what they were taught in medical school and that doesn’t include what might be called ‘applied nutrition’, using diet to heal. I have seen several otherwise competent, caring rheumatologists who had no patience at all with the idea that I was controlling my disorder on my own and without the dangerous meds which was all they had to offer. Maybe we expect too much from them. They are not miracle workers. When it comes to our bodies and RA, we are. After learning that Rheumatoid Arthritis and, most probably, other autoimmune conditions, respond to changes in diet, a number of readers have asked for an ‘arthritis diet,’ foods that will make the disorder go away. There IS a diet for rheumatoid arthritis, but, alas, there is no magic bullet. Each person has to discover his or her own. Each person’s life experiences and resulting physiology are individually unique, as are the dietary triggers for inflammation, which is what causes the pain and joint swelling of Rheumatoid Arthritis and is the underlying condition in many other conditions. Our immune systems are, for reasons yet unknown, miraculously exclusive to each of us and each person has to learn for him/her self what their own personal triggers are. How to learn? That part is fairly simple. Below is some of the recent research showing the impact of diet on inflammation and RA. You will note that little of it has been conducted in the United States where so much health related research is subsidized by drug companies and therefore involves only sophisticated and dangerous pharmaceuticals instead of more benign and less toxic dietary measures. These articles deal with the effects of diet on inflammation, the immediate cause of arthritis destruction; with the impact of a Mediterranean diet – high in olive oil and vegetables; with the effect of omega-3 fatty acids like those found in olive oil and fish; with the role of gluten in inflammatory disease. One article notes that chronic fatigue can be improved by an anti-inflammatory diet and another concludes that a person’s psychological sense of empowerment plays a role in the course of the disease. Several mention that fasting is a way to immediately calm the inflammatory disease process. The only possible conclusion, if avoiding food eliminates the symptoms, is that foods are the immediate cause of the disorder. There is an article about the improvement some had with a vegetarian diet, even though the diet included foods that would be, for some, an immune system trigger for inflammation. The almost universal problem with dietary research into RA and other autoimmune diseases is the rigidity of the study design and the lack of understanding that autoimmune disease processes are uniquely personal. A one-size-fits-all approach, where the diet for everyone is controlled for specific foods, will result in a study that lacks the power to show clear and definitive improvement. Nevertheless, many of these did just that, and those that produced questionable results still managed to show that diet could improve not only arthritis, but according to several included below, also chronic fatigue, heart disease and other inflammatory conditions.
************************************************************* Continue reading Diet and Rheumatoid Arthritis: The Research I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room because I’d had a small problem for several months that I seemed to be managing all right. I’d lost a little weight, had what seemed like a continuous low grade fever and endless fatigue. The joint pain present when I woke up would disappear after I took a few aspirin. Then I was good to go until the next day when I’d repeat the process. Rheumatoid arthritis ran in my family so when my joints began to ache, I thought Ishould get checked out. But if this was as bad as it would get, hey! I could handle it! As I looked around the rheumatologist’s waiting room I began to sense something unwelcome in the pit of my stomach. It felt a little like foreboding. Many of those in the room were using wheelchairs, walkers or canes. I brushed away the dread and anxiety. I hadn’t even been diagnosed. Within two hours I had been assessed by the physician and my blood sample had gone to the lab. The verdict came in. I may have felt perfectly normal at that early stage but the blood work told a different story. Accidental Confirmation from the Mainstream Medical Establishment It should be getting harder for the medical establishment to continue to discount the experience of those affected with RA and the mounting number of journal articles – usually from overseas where pharmaceutical companies are less powerful – attesting to the impact of diet on the disorder. Every article published by medical personnel about food allergies notes that allergies are an immune system response to a food that the body mistakes for a toxin. Some articles note that food intolerance can also be mediated by the immune system. Rheumatoid Arthritis is by definition an immune system gone haywire. Medical schools teach that the cause of the dysfunction is unknown, but, if logic eventually prevails, they will sooner or later admit that food can be a cause of any inflammatory, autoimmune condition, including RA, asthma, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohns disease, chronic fatigue and many others. Continue reading Rheumatoid Arthritis IS a Food Sensitivity Disease! The immune system is one of the miracles that comes with the baby. At a molecular level in our plasma, it stands guard relentlessly and for a life time over our health and well being. If any bacteria, viruses or other alien form breaches the mucous or skin barrier and shows up on our insides, our immune cells spring into action. Their repertoire includes a surveillance system that begins a defensive attack at the same time that it sets off alarms summoning help and reinforcements which arrive in the form of white blood cells, the ground troops of our health. The inflammation that is produced as part of this healing process can cause pain – warning us to stop whatever we did to cause this dilemma; swelling and redness – as the blood vessels expand to usher in more white cell ambulances; and warmth – a by product of all the activity. Continue reading Arthritis, Immunity, Inflammation and Stress Wouldn’t you know it. Just when we thought that we had made choices that made the adulterated American food supply manageable, Corporate Agriculture finds new ways to quietly and unobtrusively pollute our bodies. We figured a way around the colors, texturizers, hidden gluten, preservatives and taste enhancers with unpronounceable names, and thought we were home free at dinner time. But not so fast. Life and diet become more complicated with an autoimmune disease, whether it’s Rheumatoid Arthritis or any of the other conditions that can respond to food as a toxin. Before we can get control of our lives, we have to get past the first hurdle: making the connection between the way we feel and what we eat. Then, through a process of trial and error, using fasting as required and keeping a ‘food and feeling’ journal, we determine what foods work for us and which send our immune systems into a tornado of inflammation. It’s an ongoing journey as we learn that some foods set off an immediate reaction, some we can eat occasionally without ill effect, and many give us no problems at all. That’s the way it used to be. As the twenty-first century arrived the dark clouds that had been gathering for several decades finally turned American food production into a torrent of bad news for faulty immune systems and a bonanza for agribusiness. Continue reading GMO, Gasses, Irradiation and Arthritis: Subversion in the Grocery Store Jen from Ontario is finished with RA after a 3-year bout of feeling awful, taking dangerous meds, and living with fear over what the future might bring. When her doctor recommended another toxic drug to replace the Humira that was no longer effective, she had had enough. She switched to changing what she ate and is well again! She knows that it will take more experimentation and dietary upkeep, but, just like I was, is vastly relieved at the miracle of her own returning health. I don’t want to talk for Jen, so please see ‘Jens RA Journal’ in the list of ‘Other Sites’ on the right sidebar. After I was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis, I haunted book stores looking for the hope that was singularly missing in my physician’s office and from the Arthritis Foundation. And I found it. There was more than one book on the shelves that told the story of people with the disease who found their way back to health by monitoring and changing their diet. So I tried it. The effect was immediate, profound and beyond dispute. The first thing I eliminated was saturated fat. No more hamburgers, butter, pastries or anything else that contained high octane fat. I knew I was going to get well. Continue reading Is Rheumatoid Arthritis the Result of Food Allergies? |
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