Medical communities use the term rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as if it’s a diagnosis for the condition that chronically and painfully inflames the joints. A better term would be swollen joint disease, or joint hurting affliction, or unexplainable aches and pains disorder. Because let’s be honest here. If medical research hasn’t uncovered the explanation for certain sets of symptoms—which it hasn’t yet with RA—then it’s better to call it what doctors do know. Hiding behind fancy names doesn’t help anybody, least of all the patients.
Most typically, RA affects the small joints in the hands and feet. It can also affect knees, elbows, and other large joints. Rheumatoid arthritis may afflict other parts of the body, too, such as the nerves, skin, mouth, eyes, lungs, and/or heart. Joint pain and swelling are the most notable results of this illness—and, over time, joint and bone damage and/or deformity may occur. Medical communities don’t know that the actual number of Americans affected by RA is higher than reported; it’s actually around 2.5 million. Their ages range broadly from 15 to 60. RA affects five times more women than men.
Medical communities believe rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease—that is, a condition in which a confused immune system regards parts of your body as invaders and responds by perpetually attacking them. This implies your body is turning against you without your say.
The medical establishment trains doctors to use explanations like this about mystery illnesses across the board. It’s a decoy to make patients feel safe, to feel like their health-care providers understand what’s happening to them and why it’s happening, to feel like there’s a measure of control over what’s going wrong. This explanation of autoimmune disease is not the help the establishment thinks it is. When a patient gets the mental image of cells turning on one another, it sends the wrong message—that the patient’s body has betrayed her or him, that it can’t be trusted to heal.
It’s critical to know that our bodies don’t attack themselves. Here is the truth: the inflammation in the joints is there to protect you from attack by a particularly common virus. Your body is working hard to stop pathogens from digging deeper into the joints and the tissue around them. When the inflammation becomes long-term and chronic, that’s when it becomes the problem known as RA—but it is still your body working to ward off viral damage.
Doctors also believe that there’s no way to heal from rheumatoid arthritis. They’re mistaken about that, too.
This chapter explains what rheumatoid arthritis really is . . . and how you can take control and regain your health.
IDENTIFYING RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS
If you have rheumatoid arthritis, you’re probably experiencing many of the following symptoms—and with good reason. These symptoms are the result of your body using its defenses to ward off the common viral pathogen:
Doctors employ certain methods to try to identify RA, but none of them are definitive. Below is a list of specific tests they use. Keep in mind that these are fallible, because they are not designed to look for the true root cause of RA. These tests do not find the viral pathogen that triggers RA. Rather, they serve as benchmarks for how much inflammation is present in the body.
One other way to determine whether you have rheumatoid arthritis is to learn the truth about what the condition actually is.
WHAT RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS REALLY IS
Medical communities believe rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that results from your immune system somehow mistaking your joints and other body parts for invaders and attacking them. As I’ve said before, our bodies do not attack themselves. Our bodies only react to being attacked by pathogens.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a version of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
EBV chronically afflicts various parts of the body, including joints, bones, and nerves. It’s this virus that’s creating the pain and inflammation in your joints. (As for your immune system, not only is it innocent of wrongdoing, it’s your primary defense against EBV.)
As mentioned earlier, there are over 60 varieties of the Epstein-Barr virus. It will take decades for medical research to shed light on the conditions and viral mutations of EBV that create RA. When the time, energy, and resources finally go into the cause—hopefully in the next 20 or 30 years—researchers will easily discover the EBV variants that have wreaked havoc on people’s joints and nerves for over a century. And when doctors dig a little deeper, they’ll clue in to the real solutions for this virus.
Knowing that rheumatoid arthritis is a form of EBV eliminates any dark mysteries surrounding the illness. While EBV is compromising, it’s described in great detail in Chapter 3—including the steps you can take to end the virus’s damage and destroy nearly all the EBV in your system.
HEALING FROM RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS
Doctors typically treat rheumatoid arthritis using a variety of prescription anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant medications for crisis management, because that’s all they have to offer. Given the degree of pain and inflammation caused by RA, this is understandable. However, there are two problems with this strategy.
First, medications don’t address the root cause of RA—which is the Epstein-Barr virus. Because these drugs do nothing to curtail EBV, they allow the illness to continue thriving inside of you. They keep your body from reacting to the virus, as if it were not there.
Second, your main defense against EBV is your immune system—and prescription medications actually weaken your immune system. So not only are these medications failing to help you defeat EBV, they’re significantly aiding the virus.
The best approach is to read all of Chapter 3 to fully understand EBV. I hope you’ll find it liberating—and I believe you’ll benefit from the recommendations you find there.
Because the EBV that causes rheumatoid arthritis can be especially uncomfortable and difficult to manage, the following natural anti-inflammatories (i.e., that won’t weaken your immune system) are also recommended, listed in rough order of preference. They’ll help alleviate pain and promote healing from EBV:
Finally, use cold and hot packs. Place a cold pack on painful areas for about half an hour a day to reduce inflammation and speed healing, and place a hot pack on the same areas for about ten minutes a day to loosen up any muscle tension that might be developing around the damaged joints.
If you follow these recommendations, and most importantly follow all the pertinent advice in Chapter 3 and Part IV, “How to Finally Heal,” then within anywhere from a few months to two years (depending on various factors, such as your current state of health), you can rid yourself of both EBV and RA and take back control of your health and your life.
Taking Matters into Her Own Swollen Hands
Janet loved her work as an aesthetician. Making people feel good about themselves with in-home spa treatments and makeup application was what got Janet out of bed in the morning. At age 48, Janet had a lot of responsibility, though. As a single mom with two children in their late teens, she was constantly worried about keeping up with rent payments for their home, managing her team of traveling aestheticians, and getting her older son through college. On top of all this, her mother had been sick with cancer for the last year. Janet had needed to spend every weekend and all her spare hours in service to her mom—supervising doctor appointments, paying bills, shopping for groceries, helping with household chores, and getting her mom’s affairs in order.
Janet had occasionally experienced aches and pains over the years, but she always passed them off as natural, something that happened to everyone. One night in the midst of this stressful time, after staying up late to complete paperwork for her mother following a day of booked-solid client appointments, Janet noticed a stronger pain than usual in her elbows, wrists, and hands. She told herself it would be gone by morning—but when she woke up, it was even worse.
Feeling like she was unable to perform the hands-on tasks she needed to for her job, Janet booked an immediate appointment with her doctor. After blood work and a complete examination, the doctor told her, “I think you have rheumatoid arthritis.” He referred Janet to a rheumatologist, who performed another exam and additional blood tests and concluded that Janet had inflammation from certain proteins and antibodies that were associated with inflammation of the joints.
This circular reasoning didn’t fly for Janet. “But what does that mean?” she asked.
“It means you have RA, ” the rheumatologist said.
“But what’s causing the inflammation in the first place?”
The rheumatologist answered that her body’s immune system was attacking her joints and inflaming them. He handed her a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant medication.
The whole thing still made no sense to Janet. Up until now, she’d felt she could trust herself. She might not be able to trust others, like her ex-husband, or like Mrs. Ferguson, who never paid for her facials, but Janet had always trusted her body to be on her side. She didn’t understand why her body had decided to start attacking itself. It felt like a betrayal.
She feared the condition would get worse over time. If this had started out of the blue, then what, she wondered, was to stop her body from continuing to hurt her? She looked at her 82-year-old mother, battling cancer, and wondered how much worse off she’d be at that age. At 48, Janet’s mother had been in fine health. She’d never had to deal with this RA business. Could Janet’s body even make it to 70?
Janet decided to take matters into her own swollen hands and booked an appointment with a functional medicine doctor, who looked at Janet’s previous blood work, ordered additional tests, and then came up with the same diagnosis of RA. Janet asked Dr. Tanaka what was causing the rheumatoid arthritis. The doctor told Janet it was autoimmune, that is, that the body was attacking itself. Janet pressed Dr. Tanaka for a better explanation, but she didn’t seem to have one. Instead the doctor instructed Janet to eliminate wheat gluten and processed sugar from her diet and to take a pile of supplements, which included fish oil, vitamin D, and B complex.
On this regimen, Janet felt a little better. The pain wasn’t as aggressive in her elbow, but her hands and wrists were still far from normal. She could only perform her job on what she called “good” days, and she only got so many of those a month. Not only was she losing income; she’d also had to hire a helper for her mother, and that was draining her bank account.
One day a special client, Olivia—the woman who’d encouraged Janet to start her own business years earlier—called to book Janet to do the bridal party makeup for her daughter’s wedding. When Janet told Olivia she’d have to send one of her team members in her place and explained the reason, Olivia told Janet, “You’re calling Anthony.”
My initial scan of Janet showed inflammation in her nerves and joints. It wasn’t because her body was attacking itself, though. Spirit recognized it instead as the viral condition known as Epstein-Barr. Janet’s immune system was trying to fight a battle and was working in her favor to fend off the virus. It was doing everything it could to prevent the virus from entering her connective joint tissue. Meanwhile, the immunosuppressant medications she’d been taking were suppressing her immune system so that her body couldn’t defend itself against the virus.
When I explained to Janet that EBV takes the form of mononucleosis in one of its early stages, Janet recalled having a case of mono in college, and how all her joints had hurt in a similar manner. Finally, an explanation clicked. She understood that the virus had morphed from its original mono form and burrowed deeper into her body, remaining more or less dormant until the strain of the last year, along with stress-eating certain foods that contained hidden triggers, had brought it to the surface. It all made perfect sense. And learning this truth allowed her to trust her body. She felt her fighting spirit come back, ready to help her heal.
To bring Janet back to health, we focused on the power of fruits and vegetables, concentrating on the specific antiviral ones as listed in the protocols in Chapter 3, “Epstein-Barr Virus, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Fibromyalgia.” After the 28-day Healing Cleanse I describe in Chapter 21, Janet was back to working almost full-time.
Within three months, she was back to her normal workload and schedule.
Janet kept her mother’s aide on part-time and started taking grocery bags of healing foods to her mom’s place, showing the helper how to prepare fruit smoothies, mango salsa, spinach soup, and other dishes that would keep her mother’s immune system strong.
A year after our first talk, Janet was still following the EBV protocols and staying away from trigger foods—and she didn’t have one ache or pain. In fact, she felt better than she had in years. She now owned the truth that she didn’t have RA, and she reveled in the fact that she’d finally conquered that little mono virus from college.
When the holidays came and Janet was twice as busy as usual, she didn’t flinch when she looked at her jam-packed calendar. Instead, she said, “Bring it on.”