Hi! This is Dr. George Best, from Best Health and Wellness in San Antonio, Texas. On today's videos I wanted to discuss topics that -- it's kind of taken for granted in most of Western society and that is arthritis and aging. Most people assume that as they get older that they are going to have arthritis. I felt that's a normal part of aging, that's what we have been told, isn't it?
Well, I am here to tell you that arthritis is not due to aging per se. What's this? Yeah, I know doctors have been telling you for years. They say, oh God, you should expect that some arthritis at your age. That's not the case at all. Arthritis is not due to aging, it is due to long term damage that occurs to your joints. Now if you are -- the longer you've been around, the more years you've been on this planet, the more opportunities you have to developing that do cause arthritis, but just the fact that you are older doesn't mean that you should have arthritis.
So, what does cause arthritis? Well, I am talking primarily about the degenerative arthritis, but other types including the inflammatory arthritis types such as rheumatoid follow this pattern to some extent as well. But it really comes down to a couple of things. One is abnormal mechanical wear and tear, and two is insufficient nutrient intake or insufficient intake of the right nutrients to give your body where it needs to rebuild the joint tissue.
Let's take these one at a time. Abnormal wear and tear. Abnormal wear and tear comes from a lot of different things that interfere with joint function. That can be things such as major accidents, such as car accidents, falls and things of that nature, or it can be due to what's called microtrauma, and microtrauma is things like being in the one posture for long periods of time for years and years and years. Such as, if you go home at the end of the day and you get in your couch and you kind of slouch down and your neck is kind of pushed forward and your back is kind of rounded, that puts a lot of stress on joints of the spine and doing this for years and years and years causes those joints to start to degenerate. It puts them in a weird position. A lot of times it will stuck in that position and so without normal movement through the joint a couple of things happen.
One is that the body will start to move differently it will shift the mechanical stresses to other areas and sometimes those areas will start to develop excessive wear and tear, or in the area where the joint is stuck and it's not moving, you don't get adequate circulation of nutrients, and adequate removal waist products from that area and soon you have basically a chemical breakdown of the joint, because it's not able to get what it needs to be rebuild and it's not able to get what it needs to remove waste products.
So that takes me into the second part of what causes arthritis, and that is inadequate nutrients in the body to repair the joint material. This is one of those things that a lot of times people aren't aware of. Your body is constantly rebuilding and that is very true in the joints. This is why joints replacement surgeries a lot of times, they want to hold off on them for a long time, because when you put an artificial joint in the body, it's going to wear down. No matter what happens even with perfect conditions, perfect fiber mechanics those artificial joints are going to wear down, because they don't do what normal joints do. They don't do what your natural joints do and that is constantly rebuild and repair themselves.
For that constant rebuilding and repair you need certain things. You need nutrients like Vitamin C, which is important in collagen formation. You need things like Glucosamine and Chondroitin. You need things that are basically sulfur sources, which are hard, to allow your body to rebuild cartilage and to lubricate the cartilage surfaces when you are trying to move.
So there are several different things that you need and I am not going to go into specifics on this video. I do have a lot more information about what you can do nutritionally on my blog as you can see on the bottom of the screen. www.besthealthandwellnessinfo.com. But those are the basic causes of arthritis, not aging. When you get older like I said you have had more opportunities to have traumas and microtraumas, and maybe you have not been exactly perfect with your nutrient intake, so things do start to breakdown.
So just because arthritis is common in older people doesn't copy that it's normal for older people. So that concludes this video and I hope you have got a new insight on how arthritis actually develops. I will be discussing this more on future videos, but for now I am signing off. Thank you for watching!
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