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.
- You’ll see no prognosis for a disability or early death due to rheumatoid arthritis, because those possibilities may not even exist in your universe.
- There are no statistics about the dismal chances for living a healthy lifestyle with RA because those numbers don’t include you and me.
- There is no advice about adapting your reduced life to the disease because chances are good you won’t have to.
- There is no strategy for pain management in these pages because that will be within your easy control.
- You’ll see no pictures of deformed joints. Promise.
- You’ll read not a word about how miserable you might be, or others with the disease are. I’m living proof of the alternative. And you can be, too.
- There will be no recipes or lists of do’s and don’ts because the disease is so personal to your biology that only you will know how to treat it. All specific do’s and dont’s that apply to you will have to be discovered by you.
- You will find no threats about how bad your life or anything else will be if you don’t buy something. At this moment there is a web site that says, in front of God and everybody, ‘your life will be toast’ after a diagnosis of arthritis. The site seems to belong to an entrepreneurial M.D. who has written an expensive book he wants you to buy.
- Which brings me to my last point: You’ll see no ads or endorsements for pharmaceuticals or for persons or groups that benefit from ill-health – and you’d be surprised at how many of those there are. Like that author that I just mentioned.
If you’re looking for any of those items, you’ll have to find another book, visit the website for the Arthritis Foundation, do a Google search for ‘arthritis’, or, quite possibly, visit your rheumatologist’s office.
In these pages you’ll find the safe, effective and healthy alternatives for treating rheumatoid and other forms of inflammatory conditions that have proven successful for thousands of individuals over, probably, centuries. The ideas you’ll find at this web site are neither new nor original. Just unofficially hidden.
Gathering new threats to our ability to control our lives and our health will be discussed in detail later. For now, let me simply note that there are ominous new, extremely serious, 21st century threats to our well being that must be addressed by those of us with autoimmune conditions who are so at risk. The alternative for a healthy future for everyone with arthritis, allergies, asthma, and other related disorders, is quite literally up for grabs right now. Developments in commercial food biology and chemistry labs, as well as factory farms, are in the midst of changing our food supply into something unrecognizable and potentially unprocessable (is that a word?) , by our bodies.
The option for health should be available to everyone but for those with arthritis and other immune disorders, it may be disappearing.
This issue has to be important to us or it will be important to no one.
Despite the many thousands of fully functioning people with long term arthritis who have found their own way to health over the decades, remarkably little has changed in the recommendations of the medical establishment, even as the world changed around it: as alternative healing methods assumed greater importance and as conventional medicine lost more and more of its hold on the average patient. Now as then, the great majority of physicians rely on pills and injections, just as they were trained to do. The only real change has been in the level of lethal danger of the new pharmaceuticals, a subject we’ll get to later.
I have been a patient of several rheumatologists and I have the greatest respect for their compassion, good will, and knowledge of the mechanics of the disease. But they know what they were taught in medical school, and that is mediated to an unconscionable degree by the largesse of drug companies. Articles in medical journals rely to an astonishing, scandalous, degree on funding by pharmaceutical companies. Until recently, articles published in professional journals extolling the benefit of a drug were not even required to acknowledge the sponsorship of the drug companies.
The result is that physicians rely heavily on a tradition of drug-based healing that offers persons with arthritis no long term benefit and the possibility of great harm.
More on this to follow.
* This blog is not a substitute for medical advice.