Simon Barker: Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease. The condition that involves the body attacking parts of itself and in this case, in the case of rheumatoid arthritis, it's attacking the joints causing pain, difficulty with motion, sometimes even deformities.
Nobody is entirely sure why people develop autoimmune diseases. We know that there is a genetic component, we know that there is an environmental component and certainly there seems to be strong link with the way that people eat and the way that they live their lives.
There are a variety of different conventional treatments for rheumatoid arthritis. Often, they start out using anti-inflammatory or painkillers and those can be very hard in the stomach and cause a lot of their own problems. But if those don't work, or if they're not being effective enough then typically, they'll use more aggressive treatments like plaquenil and methotrexate. Methotrexate is actually a chemotherapy drug and there are number of really significant side effects with these headaches, nausea and so forth.
And one of the major problems is that these treatments are for life. Rheumatoid arthritis is not expected to go away and so the people are treated long-term with these medications.
The patient comes to see me with rheumatoid arthritis. I want to look for what their root causes are. Often times, central issue is around the gut. Leaky gut is a significant problem and that can lead to food sensitivities, that can also be environmental toxins that are a problem. Bacterial and fungal toxins in the gut can also play a role.
Naturopathic treatment of rheumatoid arthritis wants to address each of these causes in turn. We want to focus initially on the gut. We want to make sure that we're dealing with the central issue. Finding out what the food sensitivities are and avoiding those food sensitivities, doing what we can, support the intestinal lining, dealing with any overgrowth of bacterial and fungal toxins, and dealing with any toxicities from the environment the patient has developed.
We may want to use natural anti-inflammatories to help reduce the pain and discomfort of the arthritis as we're dealing with these central root issues. Rheumatoid arthritis can be a very difficult disease to treat but I find great success with many of my patients. Many of my patients are completely awful, their medications within 3-6 months, and some of them have reversed the disease completely, and some would like to reduce or reverse rheumatoid arthritis.
You should think about trying the natural living lifestyle. There are a number of aspects in natural living lifestyle. Well, one of the most important is diet. We think about diet for rheumatoid arthritis. We want to look at decreasing inflammation, so we want to take out foods that are going to increase inflammation like red meat, dairy products. And we want to put in foods that are going to decrease inflammation, vegetables, fish for example. We want to think about adding in supplements that maybe helpful probiotics and omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flax or fish oils can be very helpful for patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
Of course, I recommend the patients find a doctor to help them with their quest.
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