Lesson ONE:

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Lesson ONE:

May 17, 2011 by Katherine Coble

Never subscribe to a health magazine run by drug companies.

All of their health tips are pulled off Wikipedia OR involve the drugs made by the company who runs it.

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Posted in Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse | 7 Comments

7 Responses

on May 17, 2011 at 3:45 pm | Reply nm

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
- on May 17, 2011 at 3:51 pm | Reply Katherine Coble
  
  Yeah, i know…who couldve seen this coming? I WAS very enlightened by the “is it RA or Gout?” article. Gout is the new hotness. Everyone in the Thinazi cognescenti wants it to be gout because gout is dietary in nature.
  - on May 18, 2011 at 11:44 am | Reply nm
    
    Granted my knowledge of gout comes primarily from historical novels, but isn’t it mostly, even exclusively, in the feet? I would think it would be pretty hard to confuse that with RA.
    - on May 18, 2011 at 12:18 pm | Reply Katherine Coble
      
      Yep. That’s why those stories are so ridiculous.
on May 17, 2011 at 11:36 pm | Reply Jill

The last MS magazine I read had a big article called “A New Era and New Drugs!” Or something like that. Some doctors believe that RA is diet related, too. For example, many celiac patients have RA prior to going off gluten and very few symptoms of it afterward. But that’s a big subject, and it’s not really that simple. The two diseases do frequently share a genetic marker, though. I’m familiar w/ celiac disease because I suffer from it–not as familiar w/ RA.
- on May 18, 2011 at 10:44 am | Reply Katherine Coble
  
  First off, sorry that you have it; Celiac disease was one of the myriad things they tested me for.
  
  But people with Celiac (and Lupus and crohn’s and about 11 other diseases) are often initially misdiagnosed with RA, because each of those diseases has an inflammatory arthritis component which mimics RA. But they dont have RA.
  
  Celiac obviously has a dietary component; as i understand it, Celiac basically an inability to process certain foodstuffs. When those foodstuffs are eaten it causes a systemic superallergic reaction, which includes inflammation in the joints.
  
  Granted you definitely know more about it than I do,seeing as it’s your plague.
  
  I know some RDs are investigating a dietary link to see if patient maintenance can be helped by elimination of foodstuffs . Every RA patient I know has also tried elimination and addin as treatment component. But even if food helps deal with the symptoms it is neither the cure nore the root cause of the problem.
  
  I wrote this on an iPad with the “help” of Autocorrect. Please excuse any weird out of context words or odd typos.
  - on May 18, 2011 at 5:20 pm | Reply Jill
    
    For your sake, and that of other sufferers, I hope researchers do find a dietary link because it would be a simple enough way to ease pain, if not a way to discover root causes. I know virtually nothing about the root causes of RA, except from what I hear in celiac circles (but perhaps they were misdiagnosed). The interesting thing is that RA, crohn’s, lupus, and many other autoimmune disorders share a genetic marker w/ most celiac sufferers. In fact, celiac is the only non autoimmune disorder in the list that shares the genetic marker. In my family, we have multiple celiac, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, MS, grave’s disease, and crohn’s sufferers (but no RA). Most of these conditions can be controlled by diet, especially crohn’s–which, as it turns out, is a catch-all disease that usually means some kind of allergic response–usually to gluten.
    
    In any case, w/ autoimmune disorders, I’ve found doctors to be of little help to me, and I simply manage day to day. And I’m only going to say this because you may relate, and not because I’m a huge complainer (sometimes I am!), but some days, I feel that since I can’t breathe well, can’t eat much of anything w/o inflammation response, and can’t sleep, I don’t belong in the world any longer. My husband and children disagree, however. And sometimes I have days when I feel great. Assuredly, I’m not in as much pain as you are, so I should just shut my big mouth and think on the positive.
    
    I apologize for the long comment.