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What do you think about arthritis?
If you believe that arthritis is incurable and can only get worse then you probably shouldn’t start trying for a cure until you have examined your convictions. I have been in full time practice as a medical herbalist since 1989 in Christchurch, New Zealand and have treated hundreds of people with arthritis in those years. Living in a culture where Western medicine is dominant most of those people come to see me already having taken copious amounts of drugs and repeatedly hearing how they have to learn to live with their problem and not expect it to improve. We have done things that have made a positive and noticeable difference but in all too many cases those people that have been improving have then not stuck around long enough to get the long term gains and changes that are necessary for lasting healing to happen. Why is that? Some loss of flexibility is perhaps inevitable as we age but no-one should resign themselves to a lifetime of suffering. Our bodies have remarkable self-healing abilities and inflammed joints can heal far more than most people could imagine but I have found that the single biggest obstacle to working with arthritis has been the beliefs that people hold about it.
The long-term conventional treatment of osteoarthritis involves substances called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS). Steroidal injections or pills may also be temporarily used in advanced conditions. The use of these drugs may be necessary in the short term. Bringing down unacceptable levels of pain or immobility is when conventional medicines make the most difference. However real problems arise when drugs are relied on for long-term therapy. Some of the side effects of aspirin and other NSAIDS (such as voltaren, indomethacin, naproxen and ibuprofen) are well known: ulcer formation, gut upsets, headaches, dizziness etc. What is less well known is that experimental studies have shown that NSAIDS inhibit cartilage synthesis and actually accelerate cartilage destruction. In other words the drugs actually increase the rate of degeneration within the joints. Several studies have attempted to determine the ‘natural course’ of arthritis. In other words, researchers have sought to determine what happens when people with osteoarthritis are given no treatment at all. One group of researchers studied the natural course of osteoarthritis of the hip over a ten-year period. At the beginning of the study, all subjects had x-ray changes suggestive of advanced osteoarthritis, yet the researchers reported significant improvements over the 10 year time with many of the them. X-rays confirmed these improvements, including complete recovery in 14 of 31 hips. These results and others raise the serious concern that medical intervention may actually promote the progression of osteoarthritis.
The short answer to can you really help arthritis is yes, but slowly and carefully. The best advice I could give anyone with arthritis is to do whatever it takes to find out which safe, natural and affordable treatment helps them the most and then just stick with it, however long it takes. What follows are the things that I have found to consistently help people, but nothing works for everyone. You don’t just have to be prepared to be patient; you also have to be prepared to experiment. Try things out properly, not just for a day or two. Discard the things that don’t seem to work and keep a hold of the things that obviously do (on average you probably need at least a week to be sure). It is dimly possible that just one of the following steps will make enough of a difference to be all that you have to do so long as you stick at it for your body to do it’s self-repair. A much higher likelihood is that you will need to do a combination of things to feel a marked and obvious reduction in pain and inflammation. One or more of the suggestions below might just be what you need to turn things around. However if you are still getting harm from a different direction at the same time then the going may be just too slow to keep going. In this regard you have to be especially careful of the possibility of both excess toxicity and/or food intolerances/allergies driving your arthritis along. I talk about both of those subjects in detail in different parts of the website : cleansing diets | allergy & intolerances I am keenly aware that this could all quickly become too much information to systematically work with so keep in mind the value of finding a good herbalist to help steer you towards what you need to worry about and away from what you don’t.
A consistent practice throughout the old systems of medicine has been to remove toxic accumulations from affected joints. Equally consistent was the idea that this kind of toxicity imposed a special burden on the kidneys. Many of the herbs with deep traditions of use for joint inflammations are also notably stimulating and cleansing to the kidneys, for example meadowsweet, celery, birch, juniper and dandelion. The major function of the kidneys is in maintaining electrolyte balance; the body’s acidity or alkalinity. Several great cultures of health and medicine have reached the same basic conclusion even though they have developed in very different parts of the world. The conclusion has been that for people with arthritis acids are bad and alkalis are good. The body has to eliminate acid metabolites; joint problems are a classic outcome of a failure to do this. If you have arthritis you should definitely reduce your intake of acidic foods and eat more alkaline foods. You can get into the detail below if it interests you but all this can be summarised into one, well-worn phrase... ‘Eat lots of fruit and vegetables’ One point needs clarification here that causes much confusion. Acidic foods are not those which taste acidic but those which leave an acidic residue after digestion. A number of foods that taste acidic (e.g. citrus fruits and tomatoes) are in fact highly alkaline. For example, however they may taste, lemons actually alkalise the body! In general it can be fairly stated that anyone who has a condition, or tendency to joint inflammations should aim to emphasise alkaline foods and spare or reduce acidic foods in their diet. What follows is a table of the food groups with their average levels of acidity. This is based on recent German studies that have determined the potential renal acid level (PRAL) in well-designed experiments.
The most acidic food of all is Parmesan cheese (PRAL 34.2!) and easily the most alkaline food is raisins (PRAL –21.0). (As an interesting side-note a popular old remedy for arthritis was to soak some raisins in Gin overnight and then eat the raisins in the morning!) Tea, coffee and wine are generally alkaline. Beer and soft drinks are acidic. Mineral water can be quite alkaline (up to PRAL –1.8) Bananas are very alkaline (PRAL –5.5), followed by apricots (PRAL –4.8). Spinach is also extremely alkaline (PRAL –14.0) Processed meats are easily the most acidic of any form of meat or fish consumption. Egg yolks are very acidic (PRAL 23.4). Chocolate, peanuts and walnuts are mildly acidic and almonds and hazelnuts are alkaline.
Most people I meet who have arthritis are chronically dehydrated. You can see it in their skin, on their tongues and in the way their blood cells clump and show brittle edges under the microscope. Oil: Take at least 3 grams of good quality omega-3 fish oil every day. How do you know it is good quality oil? Pierce a capsule and follow your nose. If it smells fishy, like you wouldn’t cook it if it was a piece of fish, then don’t put it in your body via capsule either, it’s peroxidised, i.e. rancid. Water: This one is a lot harder to get right. Just about anyone can swallow three capsules of omegas a day. 6-8 cups of water takes a lot more swallowing, but it’s just as worth doing as the oil.
~ Do you know why arthritis always feels worse in the cold? Arthritis is an inflammation of the joint. Inflammation means, exactly as the word suggests, that there is too much heat in the area. That heat creates swelling, pain and damage. Anti-inflammatory drugs are extremely ‘cooling’ they take away the inflammation and the pain, swelling etc goes down. Given all that, wouldn’t you think that an arthritic joint would feel better in the cold and be better off without and heating and mobilising movement? This is one of the many paradoxes of medicine that makes you look deeper if you want to understand what is going on. Osteoarthritis (as distinct from gout or rheumatoid arthritis) is a problem that almost exclusively effects people who have a ‘cool’ constitution. When a person’s ciculation is poor they are much more prone to getting what is known in oriental medicine as ‘stuck heat’. The joint may be too hot and inflamed but the person in general is too cool and depleted to remove the problem by themselves. Arthritis is worse in the cold or when the joint has been still because it is those times that it is that much harder for the blood to circulate around the joint, carrying away the chemistry of inflammation. People have instinctively understood this for millennia. Every great tradition of medicine views arthritis as a problem where too much debris is combined with not enough circulation. As well as eating a clean diet, including good oil and drinking lots of water it is essential that the blood is flowing through and around every affected joint in the body. There are some specific and whole body strategies that improve circulation that I will talk about in a moment in the herbal section but for the fastest and more direct treatment possible you cannot go past your own or someone else’s hands. Whatever else I may do with my patients with arthritis, one thing that is pretty much universal is to get them doing self-massage or even better, if they are lucky enough to have someone close to them that cares enough, to get a very regular massage from them. The technique and the exact cream or liniment to use are of much less importance than the simple, regular mobilising of the joint by getting hands on into it and moving everything around.
As I was saying in the last section, many people instinctively use heat to ease joint pain and around the world, throughout history, heating measures have been used to relieve pain in the joints. A slightly more detailed explanation of why this works requires us to briefly visit one of the key principles behind many natural systems of medicine. Instead of viewing symptoms of diseases as catastrophic events to be subdued at any cost the stance taken is to view these symptoms as necessary side effects of the body’s attempt to free itself from disease. So, for instance, in a situation of fever, instead of suppressing or fighting down the temperature the traditional therapist will typically use measures that actually support the fever process until it naturally breaks and resolves itself. In the case of joint inflammations this means seeing the swelling, inflammation and subsequent pain as the body’s attempt to resolve an unhealthy state of affairs within the joint. The increased blood flow and stimulation of inflammatory chemical mediators causes a therapeutic inflammation, achieving painlessly what the body has been struggling to create with pain, swelling and disability. In effect we are reading what the body is trying to do and saying ‘ok lets help smooth and speed the way for this process get to where it is going’ Heating treatments at first seem a weird thing to do when there is inflammation, theoretically it should make things worse rather than better. The proof, as always, is in the pudding. Many people, most people with chronic osteoarthritis respond positively to heating measures. You can pretty much tell straight away if it is helping because pain will be lessened and mobility increased. There are however instances when it won’t help. Sometimes a body part is already at a maximum level of inflammation and any further ‘stoking up’ would be counterproductive. Nor would you typically reach for a heating treatment for joints affected by gout or rheumatoid arthritis in their acute stages. A general rule of thumb for heating treatments is that the longer the problem has been around the more likely it is to help, working with the idea that you are helping the body to resolve something it has been trying, unsuccessfully, to do for ages.
These are the most commonly used methods of creating heat from the outside.
If you don’t already know for sure that heat helps, you should try one or more of these external heat methods before you go on to the next stage.
These are the most effective ways I know of turning up the internal heat and so helping the body to clear its stuck heat. I would hardly imagine successfully treating someone with chronic arthritis without at least one of them but you really have to try things out to know what they can or can’t do for you. This herbal remedy has a well-deserved reputation for helping with circulatory problems. Ginger has recently been picked up by the pharmaceutical industry as an arthritis and anti-nausea treatment. We can harness the benefits of ginger with higher dosages and much lower costs by simply using the fresh root and making a tea. Cinnamon has unique warming properties of its own and is well known for its blood purifying properties. The lemon and honey make the drink more palatable but also have their own benefits to the liver and immune system
~ Instructions : Add the chopped ginger with a slightly broken up piece of cinnamon stick to 1½ cups of water. Bring to the boil then gently simmer for about 5-10 minutes. Take off the heat, squeeze in ½ the lemon and then strain through a fine sieve into a cup. You should have reduced the water to less than a full cup. Add the honey and drink whilst it is still hot, you should notice a powerful feeling of warmth spreading through your body.
You will be able to purchase medicinally potent Turmeric and Ginger powder anywhere in the world where people cook and eat with spices. You may well have both of them in your kitchen right now! ~ The Dose Dosage is everything in herbal medicine; in the case of these two herbs, to be confident that they will be likely to help, you need a high dose. For an average sized person with significant osteoarthritis pain I would recommend
The best and simplest way to take these herbs is to mix them into a slurry with enough water to dilute them and then just drink them down as quickly as you can. If you can manage all this in one go then that's ok, but if you have to divide it up into smaller amounts over the day then only mix the powders into water when you are ready to drink them. As I said, this treatment is not for the faint-hearted, but if it is obviously working well within 48 hours (two treatments over two days) then you can be confident it is going to work and that persisting with the treatment for a maximum of a week before taking a break for at least 3 or 4 days will help you with some deep healing in the parts of your body that need it.
Mustard is super hot. Components called ‘mustard oil glycosides’ give this herb its powerful penetrating action and the effects on an afflicted joint can be quite dramatic. Mustard is not a typical health shop item but is very easy to obtain by buying some powdered ‘English’ mustard from your supermarket. Any brand is fine. If you already have some at home even better but it does need to be reasonably fresh; i.e. less than 12 months old. ~ Poultice : Mix the mustard powder with enough water to make 'slurry’, a thin paste. The specific amount of mustard powder you use will depend on the area you need to cover. Slowly stir in the water to make the paste, if anything err on the side of making it too runny as it thickens after a few minutes. Spread the slurry on a thin piece of material that can cover the affected joint. A piece of gauze is ideal but muslin cloth or any kind of thin cotton cloth (like a handkerchief) or even a facecloth will do the job. Place the mustard-cloth over the affected area then on top of that place a hot, wet flannel or thicker cloth. This cloth does not have to be ‘dripping’ but it should be wet rather than damp. The heat and moisture activate the mustard. You will find the heat of the poultice should gradually build then hold steady after a while. The length of time to aim to hold the poultice on is 10-15 minutes. Every few minutes check under the poultice. You will probably see the skin turning quite red, that’s ok, what you are checking for is that small bubbles or blisters are not developing. This is unlikely but you need to check for it all the same. In older times they would take this treatment all the way to the 'blistering' level because it would give the longest and deepest relief to the arthritis. A much better way to go with it is to use it more frequently but less intensely. Stop if you see the beginnings of blisters. ~ Mustard Soak for hands or feet : Simply add and mix one dsp of mustard powder into a basin of hot water, large enough to immerse the affected limb. Soak the hand or foot for 10-15 minutes. This next step is not essential but the treatment does work better if the water is kept warm. Some people achieve this by placing the treatment bowl into another larger bowl to which boiling water has been added. Alternately having an electric jug nearby that you can use to top up some hot water with is equally effective. The choice to use Mustard as a poultice or soak really depends on the body part affected. Both treatments should have a lasting benefit to warrant being repeated. There is no harm in repeating the treatments frequently, even daily, so long as they obviously help and you are aware of the potential to visibly harm the skin surface by excessive stimulation.
Cayenne is the king of heating medicines. I use it a lot in my practice but, like everything, it is not for everyone. This is one of the few times I happily use herbs in a capsule form (generally they are much more effective in liquid forms). I often get people to start with taking 2 Cayenne capsules twice a day and then gradually build up to 4 or even 5 capsules two or even three times a day. People will often reach their limit before they get to those levels, most commonly they say they just feel too hot in their stomachs, in any case the body reliably gives feedback in one way or another. I always tell people that if by misfortune one of the capsules breaks and they get a throat or stomach burn to drink milk or yoghurt but above all to not panic. As painful and burning as it feels, it is not actually ever going to harm your tissues. (this is why police all round the world spray Cayenne pepper into people’s eyes with impunity, it does no physical damage, just hurts like hell for a while). Whatever you do to heat up has to be kept up. If you stop too soon then you have to expect your body and its joints to get stuck heat again sooner or later.
Don’t be confused, if one thing worked for everyone then that is all we would be talking about. You could almost take it as a matter of fact that there is going to be something in the natural world that will make a positive difference to how you feel. Find those things and use them, patiently, with an open mind. |
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