Only glad to try and help. I had to take a while to process the information you gave to get back to you.Again, I'm very grateful for your posts, thank you. I'm sorry to say I have a rather long reply and even more questions...!
What was the impact injury if you don't mind? I had a car accident many years ago and it involved my lumbar and I had a fracture. It was minor so my doctor had a traction device ready but never used it because he felt it wasn't needed. I recovered from it but he warned me that I'd have some pain from deposits in that fracture. Thankfully I don't have those pains except when I'm out in very chilly winter weather. Wish that were the case as well for you, but maybe you can still fix it. What did the doctor diagnose and what has he told you to do so far? And why didn't he want to share blood test results with you?I am sadly in my third year (maybe fourth, I'm beginning to lose track) of trying to get any help from the NHS - arthritis was revealed initially through an impact injury, but it took two years and changing doctors to get them to even look at it. At a similar time, I lost some hearing in one ear and it's taken the entire three years to have any kind of scan done. My GP is uniquely unhelpful and won't even show me the results of any of the blood tests I've had. I played a lot of things professionally, I was a multi-instrumentalist! My first was the keyboard. I've since fallen so far out of practice that I'm not sure I could consider myself stage-ready in any instrument now. It's been an extremely depressing decline. I can't even hold a guitar properly any more and strumming is impossible, I'm trying to retrain, but it's slow going.
Have you tested your urine pH yet? How high is your uric acid? That would be where I start with. I hope you can free up your joints and get them back on the keyboards on the instruments the soonest.
Yes, they all come together. But for now, check on your urine and uric acid. If you have HbA1c info, that would also help. And you can also give info on your waking temperature and at 5pm, together with your heart rate - just to get an idea of your thyroid condition.So far, I've understood that I need to try and address any issues with excess acidity in my system, then try to bring my blood PH to an optimal range with some trial and error; and that I should try to regulate my blood sugar a bit more efficiently perhaps - I'll admit, I probably don't eat regularly enough throughout the day and this may be exacerbating things. General thyroid health is an ongoing battle, but I feel like I'm making progress. Hopefully this bit will be relatively uncomplicated compared to what comes next...
Mercury toxicity was an issue for me. I don't know if it applies to you. Perhaps if you have an oximeter, you can test your oxygen saturation and it could give you an idea. The problem is when I had mercury toxicity, I didn't have an oximeter to test my spO2 so I don't have values to use to tell you which values would indicate low blood oxygen transport. But I imagine if it is really bad, it would be around the 90s. If you can get values, please post.This has given me a lot to think about. I assume mercury isn't the only problematic substance that might be preventing good circulation of oxygen, so I suspect this will be quite difficult to address. I should probably start by getting a blood test done, but I don't have that many fillings (I don't know what they're made from) and I would be surprised if this was analogous to my situation, but perhaps it is, and if so I can worry about IV chelation (this sounds difficult to procure and quite involved...!). If the test doesn't show anything abnormal maybe I'll try to look at other substances - would lead and things like that also be an issue for similar reasons? I'll cross those bridges when I get to them.
There are other causes like lung problems as well but that's a long shot, just as mercury toxicity is a long shot but still you never know.
Do you have periodontitis? What is CIMT? If you want to explore this route, I think it's to see a dentist who can analyze a dental xray taken using a cone-beam xray machine. I don't know if it's available in the US (regulatory thing), but it helps a knowledgeable and skilled dentist identify periodontal pockets that normally stay hidden with regular xray scans. Still, you'd have to get a good dentist as identifying these periodontal infections require skill and experience.I assume your worries about arterial plaque were linked to your concerns about oxygen circulation? I have had plenty of problems with dental health, I still have some oral plaque right now, even... did you test for this, or just assume it was the issue? I'm not even sure how to go about getting this assessed - I'm reading about CIMTs now but I'm not certain how I'd be able to get one. Which antibiotics did you settle on, and for how long? How did they work?
But before you do that, take your blood pressure and if it's normal, it's more likely you don't have a periodontal issue. To be more certain, also take a CBC blood test so you can look at the white blood cell differentials and it may reveal low level infection, and if that's the case, the case for periodontal infection begins to build up (assuming there are no other sources of infection).
Increasing protein intake may help, but I don't think it lands a blow right where it can knock the problem down. What sort of bone irregularities do you have? Are they dislocations or are they bone spurs or outgrowth? I don't have experience with that as thankfully they seem to have resolved by themselves, and my case is probably not as complex as yours. But I felt that there surgeries are often resorted to because the doctors have no simpler method (perhaps this is no accident but by design by the people who design the curriculum used to train doctors; more unsolved problems result in more intervention such as rx drugs and surgical procedures - more profits).Even assuming I can deal with all the problems in the tissues surrounding a joint, I'll still have bone irregularities which scrape against said tissue and cause impingement. I asked Ray Peat about this not long ago and he recommended increasing my protein intake (which I thought was actually quite high already), and checking vitamin D levels. Did you have any experience with this sort of thing? I'm a candidate for multiple kinds of arthroscopic surgery to remove them at the moment. Is the idea generally that if everything else is in place, the body will be able to restore these things adequately on its own, or is there something specific I should look at beyond what you've already mentioned?
I think that maybe that's why Ray told you to take more protein for the sulfur in it. It's whole food and it works better than taking isolated supplements. Unless you have no choice but to live off low meat intake, which are rich in sulfur in the amino acids cysteine and methionine, you'll have to take MSM. Acid-base balance is more impacted by the presence or absence of good sugar metabolism though.Finally: can I take it you stopped using MSM not long after this thread? I can sort of imagine it helping if it was optimising sulfur metabolism and there was an excess of it or sulfates in your diet anyway - did it initially help bring your blood PH to where it should be, do you think?