Most of us accept that, as we get older, we’ll be more likely to start suffering from aches and pains. Even in early middle age, many people suffer back pain that is so severe that they have to take time off work.
We may not even call it arthritis: it might start out as a twinge that just gets progressively worse. Only half of us even bother to see a doctor about our aches and pains, most likely because, like the medical profession, we are resigned to accept it as an unwelcome consequence of growing older. It’s just ‘wear and tear’, as our family doctor might put it.
But these ‘worn-out’ joints have reached pandemic levels in the Western world. A chronic condition that bedevils conventional medicine, it’s one of the most common diseases associated with old age, and one of the biggest causes of disability at any time of life.
An estimated 10 per cent of the world’s population over the age of 60 currently displays osteoarthritis symptoms. Arthritis can strike at any age, within any ethnic population – although according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA, Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders are almost half as likely to develop the disease as non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic Afro-Americans.
According to the National Health Interview Survey in 2011, more than 50 million people in the United States reported having been diagnosed with some form of arthritis, including some 300,000 children. The situation is no better in Britain, where unofficial estimates suggest that nine out of every 10 people will suffer from it in some form before they die.
Actually, arthritis isn’t a proper disease but an umbrella term that describes a collection of symptoms with many potential causes. Arthritis simply means inflammation of one or more joints in the body. Pain and stiffness are the most universal symptoms of arthritis, and the pain, which can be severe, is as crippling as the physiological debilitation itself. Arthritic pain is caused by joint inflammation and, when the cartilage that protects joints breaks down, the rubbing action when unprotected bone meets bone. The word derives from the Greek: arth means ‘joint’ and itis means ‘inflammation’.
This general term covers some 200 specific forms of the condition, ranging from osteoarthritis, which is the most prevalent, to rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, gout and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Doctors even use this catch-all term now to describe musculoskeletal conditions such as polymyalgia rheumatica or any disease of the bones and joints, back pain, osteoporosis, and soft-tissue rheumatism.
Despite the common nature of the problem and the considerable amounts of money spent on researching it, medicine has found no real answers to arthritis in any of its widely varied forms.
Conventional treatment for arthritis conditions, unsurprisingly, focuses on the use of pharmaceutical medications to mitigate symptoms and hopefully to slow the progress of the disease.
The typical arthritis patient is likely to be offered a giant arsenal of drugs falling into three broad treatment categories: painkillers, anti-inflammatories and ‘disease modifiers’. The latter are drugs that claim to halt or even reverse the arthritis process – a term and outlook that seem far too optimistic, considering the consensus view that current drugs on offer fail to control disease adequately in many patients.1
In fact, drug side effects accompany most standard treatments, many of them as debilitating as the disease they purport to treat, and not infrequently life-threatening, particularly as some patients end up being prescribed a variety of drugs for upwards of 30 years or more.
Surgery, of course, is the ‘last stop’ treatment when all else fails – and the conventional ‘all else’ often does fail. Approximately 500,000 knee replacements and more than 175,000 hip replacements are performed annually, in America alone, and those numbers are on the rise. According to a study presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in 2006, the number of hip replacements was anticipated to increase by 174 per cent and knee replacements by 673 per cent over the next 20 years.
This book will be something of a revelation if you’re an arthritis sufferer who’s been told that nothing can be done for you other than to take a painkiller and wait until you’re a candidate for joint replacement surgery. You don’t have to suffer in silence as the arthritis gets progressively worse. As you’ll discover in these pages, there’s a large array of options open to you – including dietary changes, alternative and complementary medicine, supplements, body and mind therapies – many with a proven track record of success.
Our findings should give you great hope. There are many things you can do to overcome or lessen your symptoms, and some of these may even reverse the disease itself. These ideas are not based on the case studies of a handful of people, but are the result of painstaking scientific research, used successfully on thousands of sufferers like yourself.
Being healthy, staying healthy and getting healthy require information, effort and frequently a willingness to go against conventional thinking in healthcare. In too many instances the conventional approach is simply a process of symptom management, created by an industry that stands to gain primarily from lifelong drug management, not from cures.
This book will give you the necessary information to make informed choices for your health and well-being with regard to arthritis – how to prevent it and what to do to get on the path to healing if you’re already dealing with it.
In the following pages, may you begin your journey to better health.