Very, very interesting. I've written about my advanced periodontal disease before, and I believe the bacteria lodged in my jaw were the cause of my joint pains. Since taking high-dose iodine, my joints are reborn. I'm fairly convinced now that these periodontal bacteria were floating around attacking my joints, and iodine nuked them. Iodine is also a potent anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant.
Figure 2 illustrates the reductive capacity of different chemical forms of iodine in comparison with ascorbic acid, using the in vitro ferric reducing/antioxidant power assay; it shows that I2 exerts a 10- or 50-fold greater antioxidant action than ascorbic acid or KI, respectively.
Iodine also has well-known anti-inflammatory effects. It is well established that povidone–iodine, besides its excellent antibacterial effect (47), also exerts an anti-inflammatory action by neutralizing radical oxygen species (48). Moreover, I2 inhibits the generation of nitric oxide in murine macrophages and tumor necrosis factor-α expression in human monocytes/macrophages (49). These specific actions of iodine agree with reports describing the anti-inflammatory effects of marine algae, which, as noted above, contain the highest iodine concentration of living organism, and suppress the levels of proinflammatory messengers such as nitric oxide, prostaglandine-E2, and proinflammatory cytokines (tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-6, and interleukin-1β) (50).