Arthritis And MSM

yerrag

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I have arthritis on my left knee. The pain occurs when I walk up stairs. The pain would be more intense as the angle of ascent gets steeper. This is the only part of my body that has pain, and I can attribute it to my fondness of leaping. I thought it would be a way of maintaining my leg dexterity, but it must have caused my knee and its surrounding muscles, ligaments, and tendons to be overused.

So now I have this chronic condition. I looked up arthritis.org, and there is a long list of arthritic conditions. I believe that chronromalacia patella is the condition I am facing. http://www.arthritis.org/about-arthritis/types/chondromalacia-patella/

WhenI take MSM as a supplement, the pain would go away. But it would come back when I stop taking MSM. I wonder why it would have such an immediate effect.

Are the Health Benefits of MSM Related to Sulfur? :

"at least four human clinical trials have been conducted on MSM and its ability to help with exercise recovery, and muscle injuries like delayed onset muscle stiffness or soreness (DOMS) and large muscle injuries like that from a heart attack—all of which is related to oxidative stress and subsequent cellular damage."

MSM contains sulfur, and "Sulfur is just now becoming more widely appreciated as a really critical nutrient, without which many other things don’t work properly, and most people are probably not getting enough sulfur from their diet anymore. For example, sulfur plays a critical role in detoxification, and also in inflammatory conditions. For detoxification, sulfur is part of one of the most important antioxidants that your body produces:glutathione. Without sulfur, glutathione cannot work."

I'm currently taking only 1.5 grams per day, and I'm thinking of gradually increasing it to 6 grams per day, as the article mentions that is the range of intake that is effective.

I have seen a sports therapist before, and I was told to strengthen the surrounding muscles around that knee using bands of rubber that would strengthen those muscles with repetitive exercise. That might have improved my condition, but I wouln't know because it was something I find hard to do on a regular basis.

Long after, I went to see a therapist who practices neuromuscular therapy, which is a therapy that involves massaging muscles that would remove lactic acid that has been trapped in our muscles. The theory behind the therapy is that because of the presence of lactic acid, our muscles could lose communication with the brain, and that the brain would not know that our muscle is in a contracted state, and would keep sending signals to the muscle to contract. The muscle would be in a perpetual state of contraction, and would not be in a relaxed state. My massaging the muscle and releasing the lactic acid trapped in the muscles, the communication of the muscle with the brain would be restored, and the muscle would be in a state of relaxation and stress conditions would be relieved.

Why I mention neuromuscular therapy is because of how it pinpoints lactic acid as a cause of many of the aches we are experiencing. Practitioners tell of how their therapy even dispenses with the need for hip replacements. Having read a lot about lactic acid from Ray Peat's articles, I thought about the implications if our body can minimize the production of lactic acid by making energy production very efficient through oxidative metabolism. This would minimize lactic acid production, as the products of effective metabolism would be carbon dioxide and not lactic acid.

It made me think that maybe my knee pain is not so much a result of my abuse of my knee, but more about my knee being the weakest point in my body (since it has been abused), and that it would be the first to show expressions of degeneration due to my body's inefficient production of energy.

NMT (neuromuscular therapy) and MSM supplementation are merely band-aids to deal with a condition arising from inefficient metabolism and its resulting by-product lactic acid (an assumption I make).

Assuming lactic acid is causing the pain I'm experiencing, and assuming that MSM resolves somehow the problem of lactic acid in the muscles surrounding my left knee, I have this question:

What are possible mechanisms involved that allow MSM to remove the lactic acid on the muscles surrounding my left knee? Does MSM improve somehow the efficiency of metabolism, such as it could signifiantly alter the amount of lactic acid being produced?

In parting, let me quote from the article "We found that they were indeed dose-related, but the interesting thing was it was inversely related. The more MSM you took, the less sulfate was excreted in your urine. What that says is it’s much more complicated than just a strict sulfur donor. It is a compartmentalization of sulfur and sulfur metabolism within the body. That suggests that MSM is actually allowing better metabolism, better incorporation of the sulfur throughout the body. It’s not just a simple sulfur donor...'”
 

Queequeg

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good write up @yerrag. I was doing some research on arthritis for my mother and came across it. I also have used MSM for knee pain and found it works great. I will probably have a jar sent off to her. Any new insights into arthritis cures/results?
 
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yerrag

yerrag

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Thanks Queequeg. Glad msm is working also for you. I haven't followed up on my plan to increase its usage, but I found it unnecessary for me lately. I bought a red laser device called Tendlite at Amazon, which Dan Wich had listed among the many red light devices at his toxinless site.

I bought it for my mom for her knee arthritis. I can't tell if there was improvement on her on a once daily sked, and she's been on it for a month. I would have to increase it to 3x a day and see how it goes.

But on myself, it has done a wonderful job. The knee pain I was having was gone only after using it for 1 day.

My guess is that the red light was like the last thing I needed to complete its recovery. I have a much better thyroid condition, and I suspect my mom to be hypothyroid.

I recall listening to one Ray Peat interview on arthritis. I have to listen to it again as I'm not sure if it was thyroid or pregnenolone or progesterone that he cited to deal with it. But with a healthy thyroid, I would think those hormones would be abundant and having enough thyroid would be key.
 
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yerrag

yerrag

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Queequeg

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yerrag

yerrag

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You're welcome. In addition to red light therapy, gelatin also helps. I'm starting to put more collagen hydrolysate in my mom's milk blend, replacing the whey protein, which has plenty of tryptophan and cysteine. I started today so it could help resolve her arrhythmia, but realized glycine would also help with arthritis, so it's good news if I could shoot two birds with one stone.

Gelatin, stress, longevity :

For a long time, gelatin's therapeutic effect in arthritis was assumed to result from its use in repairing the cartilage or other connective tissues around joints, simply because those tissues contain so much collagen. (Marketers suggest that eating cartilage or gelatin will build cartilage or other collagenous tissue.) Some of the consumed gelatin does get incorporated into the joint cartilage, but that is a slow process, and the relief of pain and inflammation is likely to be almost immediate, resembling the antiinflammatory effect of cortisol or aspirin.

Inflammation produces fibrosis, because stress, hypoxia, and inadequate supply of glucose stimulate the fibroblasts to produce increased amounts of collagen. In lungs, kidneys, liver, and other tissues, glycine protects against fibrosis, the opposite of what the traditional view would suggest.

Since excess tryptophan is known to produce muscle pain, myositis, even muscular dystrophy, gelatin is an appropriate food for helping to correct those problems, simply because of its lack of tryptophan. (Again, the popular nutritional idea of amino acids as simply building blocks for tissues is exactly wrong--muscle protein can exacerbate muscle disease.) All of the conditions involving excess prolactin, serotonin, and cortisol (autism, postpartum and premenstrual problems, Cushing's disease, "diabetes," impotence, etc.) should benefit from reduced consumption of tryptophan. But the specifically antiinflammatory amino acids in gelatin also antagonize the excitatory effects of the tryptophan-serotonin-estrogen- prolactin system.
 

CreakyJoints

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Hello! I also suffer from arthritis and I'm really glad this thread is here - I'm going to take advantage of the user above resurrecting it to ask if you had any improvement since 2017, @yerrag ?

I recently got in touch with Ray Peat about it myself and he offered some interesting (though perhaps not unexpected) advice. I'm not sure how much it would apply to your situation, and certainly I'm not sure it would help your mother.

My understanding is that physiotherapy is not only for improving the surrounding muscle in a problem area, but also for ensuring the movement you are making on a regular basis is not exacerbating the problem. I suppose it's a little more difficult in the knee, but for shoulder-related issues, half the battle with physio is correcting posture. I was always told that if you were fatiguing easily or struggling through it, it was best to reduce the tensile strength of whatever resistance equipment you are using, and it's unhelpful to view it as a muscle-building exercise in general.

Incorporating gelatin into my diet has been the single biggest improvement - but my arthritis is always, always considerably worse and much more painful when I have not slept properly. I wonder if this tallies with your findings about lactic acid and MSM? How did you get on with these things, and would you recommend them?

I've also found red light to be helpful, but I'm not sure at all about those tiny little bulbs - my understanding is that it would have to be rather powerful (and IR-only) to penetrate far enough to improve matters around the bone. I use a security floodlight, which was very inexpensive (I don't understand at all the justification for the prices on the websites linked here, the components used to build those are incredibly cheap, it surprises me that they do so well amongst users here).

Also I would like to say: although this subforum does exist and arthritis is a degenerative disease, I feel a bit irked that there is no arthritis subforum but there are ones for hair and conspiracy theories. I assure everyone reading this: arthritis is far more debilitating than hair loss, and it has considerably more to do with Ray Peat's work than people with absolutely no critical faculties foaming at the mouth about lizards from the moon being in government to protect minorities or whatever.
 
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yerrag

yerrag

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I had to backread to read what I had posted. And since that time, I've learned more about arthritis as it relates to me, and found that what i knew then barely scratches the surface, and I've even found red light therapy and Ray's ideas on it to only form a part of the subject of arthritis. Even so, I'm still bewildered at the many forms of arthritis, and the terms used to describe it. There osteo, rheumatoid, reactive etc etc. and there appears to be no consistency in the use of these terms. You could spend a whole year researching on it, and you could feel like you entered a maze that keeps growing in complexity the further you move on.

In short, I'm no expert on this and what I can say is that my arthritis is gone and it's not because of red light nor because of taking in pregnenolone or progesterone or thyroid. My hormones have been fine all along, and red light only fixed me temporarily.

One cause of arthritis I experienced was high uric acid crystals forming in joints. The solution is to change my lifestyle to correct an acidic acid-base balance. An acidic system would cause uric acid to precipitate in joints, and this would be the source of joint pain. Once I was able to verify that my acid-base balance was optimal, where urine pH would stay at the range of 6.4 - 6.8 all throughout the day, my joint pains eased. I had trigger finger when I woke up and it's gone. My left knee pain was reduced, but not totally. At that time, I didn't know what it meant but now I realize there was another cause for that lingering left knee joint pain. Scratch that. There were more causes remaining than one, actually. This makes arthritis a head scratcher.

Periodontal disease in another cause when one of the bacteria in a periodontal symbiota would create an enzyme, that would convert arginine peptides into citrulline peptides, which would go on to lodge on the synovial fluids, and which would be recognized as a foreign substance by the immune system, and be attacked by it, causing inflammation and pain, if not tissue damage and degeneration: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6022223/pdf/zjom-10-1487742.pdf I had found relief when I took antibiotics to try to destroy the periodontal biofilm in my blood vessels. But still, this was not enough. There is still another cause: immune complexes.

Immune complexes are complexes formed by antibodies latched on to antigens, where the antigen could be a pathogen or a substance deemed foreign by the immune system. They're formed so that the immune system can identify it as marked for destruction, to be eaten up by immune cells called phagocytes. Not all of these are eaten up, and these an accumulate and deposit in different areas in the body such as in organs (kidney, heart, liver) and joints and even in the scalp region. They cause inflammation as part of the immune system treating them as foreign elements. They cause organ damage, baldness, and arthritis. They're pretty hard to get rid of, as the immune complexes keep accumulating and depositing, as the source could be an active infection that's not recognized as such (because there's the infection is low-level -meaning results in no fever) and just remain under the radar. Or it could be coming from the arterial plaque, which slowly release immune complexes trapped in its matrix.

I just know enough about immune complexes as I also have them, and the pain and inflammation associated with them is due to the immune system actively trying to get rid of them. The process involves phagocytosis, where inflammation is involved, as oxidants such as ROS are used to destroy them. There oxidative stress spills over the sourrounding tissues, and additional inflammation and tissue destruction could result. This inflammation is felt as arthritic pain. If the source of this form of arthritis is left unchecked, this results in chronic inflammation and tissue (or even organ) destruction. To minimize the damage from tissue destruction, our body has to have a good primary antioxidant system in place that will always be available to neutralize the effects of the oxidative stress involved at the site of inflammation. The body has many antioxidants available - albumin, uric acid, glutathione, vitamin E, vitamin C. In situations where chronic inflammation is happening, beefing up the body's antioxidant system will certainly help.
 
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yerrag

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I think all of the approaches I outlined helped it. It seemed to me there were all those contributory causes, and as I removed one after another, I was able feel less and less the pain from it.

I guess I'm just a magnet for these things. It just had to pour when it rains lol.
 

CreakyJoints

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Thank you so much for your very detailed response and the link - I really appreciate it! I'm trying to work my way through it now, it's thankfully very short, but I am so new to all of this that I need to look up a multitude of things after every paragraph I read.

I have a few (read: way) more questions, if you don't mind. If you feel that revealing this information would be going into too much detail, I'd be thrilled if you could message me about them instead.

-I'm fascinated to hear you describe it essentially in the same way I might hear someone describe gout: I know there are some parallels, I just never drew the comparison myself. Were dietary changes therefore a big part of your recovery, or bringing your acid/base balance to where you wanted it?
-Did your attempts to rectify the situation with antibiotics overlap with your use of MSM? If so, how often were you using it, and roughly how much?
-Which antibiotics did you use, at what doses and for how long, and of these, was there one which was particularly effective?
-Do you think there would be any merit to using serrapeptase in order to help combat arterial plaque?
-Were you simply determining your acid/base balance with litmus paper, or is there something more precise you would suggest?
-Of the antioxidants you listed at the bottom, were there any supplements you used to try and bolster your body's supply, or were there any dietary sources of those you were trying to consume more of?
-Perhaps most importantly: did you have any bone spurs to deal with, or irregularities which caused impingement, like many sufferers? Have the problems associated with these cessated completely for you since?

I hasten to add, I'm probably not going to immediately try to recreate your self-treatment, I'm far too cautious to just jump in like that, and am very wary of both supplementation and taking any kind of antibiotics, but I'd like to explore some of these avenues and see if anything improves matters for me.

Congratulations again on your improvement! I've been told over and over again that it's a condition with absolutely no cure or treatment, so I find stories like yours incredibly inspirational. Thanks again.
 
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yerrag

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-I'm fascinated to hear you describe it essentially in the same way I might hear someone describe gout: I know there are some parallels, I just never drew the comparison myself. Were dietary changes therefore a big part of your recovery, or bringing your acid/base balance to where you wanted it?
Dietary changes are needed, but not necessarily in the way of avoiding "foods high in uric acid" as much as knowing one has an acidic blood/ecf and how an acidic blood can cause gout and a form of arthritis by the effect of causing uric acid to precipitate and crystallize on joints. Avoiding foods "high in uric acid" is the conventional doctor's way of appearing to solve the problem by suggesting something that's way off the mark. Avoiding high purine foods (the foods supposedly high in uric acid) ends up with people avoiding foods rich in vitamins A, D, and K, and this approach has negative long term consequences. And casting uric acid as bad isn't helpful either. Uric acid is part of the body's primary antioxidant system. A lot of people with cancer have low or zero uric acid. High uric acid doesn't necessarily lead to gout. And while high uric is not a good sign, what is bad isn't in uric acid being high, as it is protective, but in the presence of a diseased condition that required the body to respond by increasing its uric acid content.

Instead of attempting to lower uric acid , test to see if the blood/ecf is acidic. Testing urine pH is a good surrogate for testing blood pH. Way more convenient and cheaper. And without the pain of arterial blood extraction which is the way to get blood pH. The allowed blood pH ranges from 7.35-7.45, but somewhere around 7.40 is optimal. This maps to a urine pH of 6.4-6.8. Taking it is as simple as dipping a pH paper on a cup of fresh urine and matching the color to a table of pH values. I use Hydrion urine pH strips pH range 5.5-8 and it can be bought from Amazon.

But be wary of factors that may increase the urine pH, in which case the urine pH would not serve as a good indication of serum pH. The presence of bacteria causing UTI could increase the urine pH to as high as 8. Also, it's said that drinking a lot of fruit juice could momentarily incease the pH of urine. And this is why it's advisable to test the urine pH throughout the day. A one-time reading during the day gives me little confidence in using it as a basis.

What I've realized though is that once my acid-base balance is optimal, the urine pH stays constant throughout the day, within the optimal range of 6.4-6.8, often right smack in the middle of this range. This is hardly surprising because it means there is good pH buffering in my system, which makes it hard for pH to fluctuate.

There is the matter of diet, having good oxygen supply in the blood, there is the matter of having a good thyroid, and there's the matter of having an overall healthy glucose metabolism that affect the overall state of acid-base balance in the body. Diet is often the focus, and if one were blessed to have the rest of the factors in their place, modifying alone the diet would work in correcting acid-base imbalances. This was my case, as I merely added more fruits and juices and cooked green leaves and milk to my diet that was already high carb with protein and some fats. The addition of electrolytes calcium, magnesium, potassium to my well-salted diet helped in that it provided enough alkaline ions (potassium, sodium, calcium, sodium) that would easily pair with acidic anions such as chloride and sulfate when needed so that the acids could easily be excreted through urine. On a diet with plenty of meat, there would be plenty of sulfates that would increase acidity in the blood, with little of the electrolytes to pair with the sulfates to be excreted as say potassium sulfate in urine. And then sometimes the acidity could be introduced by supplements, which we take without knowing the acidic effects of. An example is magnesium chloride - taken to increase magnesium. It's not a good source of magnesium, as it ends up increasing acidity through the presence of chlorides. Sometimes, we even get advice from doctors telling us not to take foods high in potassium - merely because we took an antibiotic (Cipro, for example) which results in potassium being released from our cells into the blood. This causes us to have tachycardia, or high heart rate, which is a dangerous condition. But the doctor never tells us this is a temporary condition, a side-effect of the antibiotic we took, and we are left with the idea that foods high in potassium are dangerous for us.

So far, we have only touched on diet. Next is good oxygen supply. It's getting to be long-winded. I'll have to continue as it's not something I can do in one sitting. I'll just have to continue if you still want me to continue.
 

CreakyJoints

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Yes! Please continue! If it's not too much trouble for you, of course. I was a musician, when I was told I had arthritis it was like a death-sentence, and now I feel like I'm making improvements! If I can emulate your success I would be incredibly happy!

Thank you for explaining it so simply, too - I'm still very new to all this and trying to learn, but you've made it quite easy to understand (I think!).

Just a quick question on your example: I do actually use magnesium chloride when I have a bath, but I use an equal amount of sodium bicarbonate when I do so - if I understand you correctly, this would explain my need to urinate after every bath, and I could potentially take that as an indication that the sodium bicarbonate was helping to successfully offset the excess acidity? Or are you saying supplementing it at all is likely to be problematic?
 
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yerrag

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Just a quick question on your example: I do actually use magnesium chloride when I have a bath, but I use an equal amount of sodium bicarbonate when I do so - if I understand you correctly, this would explain my need to urinate after every bath, and I could potentially take that as an indication that the sodium bicarbonate was helping to successfully offset the excess acidity? Or are you saying supplementing it at all is likely to be problematic?
The effect of mag chloride that I talked about is when taken orally. So a magnesium chloride bath would be fine. When taken orally, it is the way the gut absorbs it such that more chloride ions get into the blood than magnesium ions.

Yes! Please continue! If it's not too much trouble for you, of course. I was a musician, when I was told I had arthritis it was like a death-sentence, and now I feel like I'm making improvements! If I can emulate your success I would be incredibly happy!

Thank you for explaining it so simply, too - I'm still very new to all this and trying to learn, but you've made it quite easy to understand (I think!).
I'm glad so far I'm not losing you. I'm pretty hopeful your joints will easily become as good as new for you to resume playing. What instruments do you play? If you don't have to go through years of frustrating visits to doctors, like I did, then at least some good has come out of what I went through. I used to run a lot, but since I developed knee joint pains, I've stopped. But it wasn't a big loss, as running really isn't a good form of exercise. So I have to thank having that arthritic joint for keeping me from wrecking my body by running.


There is the matter of diet, having good oxygen supply in the blood, there is the matter of having a good thyroid, and there's the matter of having an overall healthy glucose metabolism that affect the overall state of acid-base balance in the body.

We covered diet already. Now on to good oxygen supply.

This was an issue for me since my high school days, but I never realized it until I tested heavy on mercury. I had eleven mercury fillings, and I had them all removed and after that I underwent a series of IV mercury chelation sessions. When I finished the sessions, I found that I could run 5 km uphill at a brisk pace without any need for training. Before that, I was so exhausted just running 1 km on a flat surface. This would explain why in high school I was a good 100m sprinter, but couldn't run long distances.

This had to do with mercury causing my blood to carry less oxygen. With less oxygen being carried by blood, there was less of it to be released to oxygenate tissues. With little oxygen made available to our cells, this would result in anaerobic respiration, where not much energy is produced (glycolytic respiration) and where lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide is produced. Lactic acid increases the acidity of the blood. And in such an acidic state, uric acid would easily precipitate as crystals and this would result in joint pain.

On the subject of thyroid, it's important for the thyroid to be adequate as it allows the cells mitochondria to produce energy efficiently. Being hypothyroid, the metabolic pathway instead of going to full completion at the mitochondrial level, would be stuck at the glycolytic level, where lactic acid is produced. This would contribute to to an acidic blood/ecf (extracellular fluid) and its effect would be the same as in the previous paragraph.

Lastly, having a good sugar control (correction: I said healthy glucose metabolism but I meant glucose regulation or control). This has to do with having a stable blood sugar level that provides a consistent supply of sugar to the body's tissues. Consider the drive you drive. When the supply of fuel is interrupted, you would see the car lose power and not operate in a smooth manner. When our blood sugar goes high and goes low, or fluctuates, the production of energy suffers. When there is a gap, where there is no energy being produced, this momentary gap is enough to cause the liver and thyroid gland to be unable to convert T4(the inactive form) to T3 (the active form of thyroid). When this happens, the constant production and flow of energy is interrupted, and this interruption is enough to cause efficient mitochondrial respiration to devolve into glycolytic respiration. Instead of producing carbon dioxide with mitochondrial respiration, one is instead producing lactic acid. And once again, this causes the blood/ecf to become acidic.

So all in all, it helps to understand these factors that come into play as far as keeping our body in a good state of acid-base balance. When there is balance and the ecf isn't acidic, no matter how much uric acid is in our body, the uric acid will not form into crystals, and we won't experience the arthritic pain from these crystals in our joints.
 

LucyL

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yerrag, have you experimented with benedryl or an anti-histamine substance or diet at all?
 
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yerrag

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yerrag, have you experimented with benedryl or an anti-histamine substance or diet at all?
Only to get sleep when having a hard time, usually when I have a cold or allergic rhinitis. But not for arthritis. Does it work for you?
 

CreakyJoints

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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...!

I'm glad so far I'm not losing you. I'm pretty hopeful your joints will easily become as good as new for you to resume playing. What instruments do you play? If you don't have to go through years of frustrating visits to doctors, like I did, then at least some good has come out of what I went through.

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.

So all in all, it helps to understand these factors that come into play as far as keeping our body in a good state of acid-base balance. When there is balance and the ecf isn't acidic, no matter how much uric acid is in our body, the uric acid will not form into crystals, and we won't experience the arthritic pain from these crystals in our joints.

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...

This was an issue for me since my high school days, but I never realized it until I tested heavy on mercury. I had eleven mercury fillings, and I had them all removed and after that I underwent a series of IV mercury chelation sessions.

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.

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?

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?

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?

Thanks again for all your patience and help!
 

LucyL

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Only to get sleep when having a hard time, usually when I have a cold or allergic rhinitis. But not for arthritis. Does it work for you?
My arthritis symptoms are minor- mostly in my hands. I've been taking Benadryl regularly for a couple months now, and what it seems to have done is stopped flare ups of discoid lupus on my scalp. Perhaps in combination with the progesterone I take. But it hasn't stopped the trigger fingers or aching joints in my hands. That's why I'm curious how it may have helped other types of arthritis, auto-immune, inflammation.
 

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