This short post is aimed at arthritis sufferers who have so far relied exclusively upon standard medical treatments for their disease and have yet to seek and remove the causes of their RA. This post is for those who want to gain some personal control over their rheumatoid arthritis and to stop being a slave to it.
I’m also writing this for those who’ve been recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis because I know how frightening that diagnosis can be when first presented. I’d like to tell you and reassure you that if you take the right steps at this early stage there is a very good chance that you can recover completely and not have to face the horrific stages of decline in health and function that many of us have already been through. At the very least, you should be able to halt the progression of your disease and manage it with the absolute minimum of medication or hopefully none at all.
If you are sick and tired of rheumatoid arthritis and have suffered for some time you will be well aware of its destructive effects on your life and lifestyle and upon those around you. However, no matter where you are in terms of the severity of your disease and the damage it has already caused, with the right knowledge and lifestyle changes you can make significant improvements and even put your disease into remission permanently (cure).
Wherever you are on your journey with RA now is the time to take ownership of it (if you haven’t already done so) and stop being carried along by the disease and poorly guided by the medical profession which treats it. I can’t emphasise this point enough; if I’d known what I know now a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago my life would have been completely different. A year ago I could have saved my fingers, five years ago I could have prevented crippling damage to my knees, ten years ago I could have reversed my rheumatoid arthritis completely and would never have suffered beyond that point. As it is, even now at this late stage, with my current knowledge I’m reversing my disease and healing many of my joints to various degrees.
How to Halt and Hopefully Reverse Rheumatoid Arthritis
The simple answer is that you have to find the causes and remove them, and then do everything you can to heal your body and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of all your body’s systems especially its immune system. Adopting the most healing and beneficial diet and lifestyle will simultaneously improve your health, heal damaged joints and tissues, and remove the majority of the common causes of rheumatoid arthritis. This is why diet and lifestyle changes have to be the first priority because they have the most comprehensive reach in terms of halting, treating and beginning to reverse RA.
I’ve covered this in earlier posts but it’s worth mentioning again here; drugs and other medical interventions are very important for several reasons but they only treat the symptoms and do nothing to address the causes of RA. They treat the symptoms by suppressing specific inflammatory pathways in your immune system thus reducing inflammation and pain in joints and surrounding tissues. They also slow down the damage caused to joints and other structural tissues. In the near to mid range future this may all change as T-cell-based therapies are becoming more accessible and there are other regenerative treatments in development, but even then it will still be important to work on removing the causes of RA and adopting the healthiest diet and lifestyle practices.
Always work with your physician so that your medication (if you are on medication or receiving other therapies) can be adjusted to suit your current symptoms and blood markers. This way as you improve, your physician can gradually reduce your medication to suit.
The most beneficial way to eat is to adopt a whole food plant-based diet, based on my research and personal experience this is the best diet for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers. Add to this a few essential health promoting lifestyle changes and a few additional supplemental therapies and you have an excellent chance of reversing the course of your disease.
As I mentioned above, this is just a short post to target two groups of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers which I believe are vulnerable to ever-increasing joint damage and disability because they may not ‘yet’ be aware that there are thousands of sufferers around the world halting and reversing their RA by changing their diets and lifestyles. And, that their successful efforts are supported by a huge body of science and the clinical experience of a wide range of very well respected medical doctors.
- Existing rheumatoid arthritis sufferers who are not satisfied with the results they are obtaining from their standard medical treatments and therapies, and who would like to take more direct control of their RA instead of just managing it or living with it and its medically perceived ‘inevitable consequences’ of decline and increasing disability – which for the record is completely untrue.
- Newly diagnosed RA patients who are trying to come to terms with what the diagnosis means for their futures, having been told by their physicians that this is a lifetime disease that will require continuous and increasingly potent medication in order for them to lead a semi-normal life. Or, they’ve been told that there are lots of new drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis and they’ve been given a false sense of security by their physicians and they leave the surgery unaware of the gravity of their diagnosis and as a result continued to follow the disease promoting diet and lifestyle assuming that the drugs will protect them.
If you fall into one of these two groups, I urge you to study the whole food plant-based diet, to do your own research and read about and listen to all the thousands of people that have reversed their rheumatoid arthritis by removing its causes, which in the majority of cases are diet-related. To get you started here are a few of my earlier posts where I cover these diet and lifestyle changes in more detail and provide lots of references for further reading and viewing.
- Is There a Cure for Rheumatoid Arthritis? Yes! By Removing the Cause(s)
- Dairy and Rheumatoid Arthritis – Cow’s Milk as a Cause of Chronic Diseases
- Natural Treatment For Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Rheumatoid Arthritis – Prioritise Diet and Lifestyle Changes
- What Causes Rheumatoid Arthritis?
The most reliable, science-based, experienced, knowledgeable, successful (by consistently and permanently helping patients) physicians in terms of human health and the treatment and prevention of chronic diseases are all working in the whole food plant-based field. Here are a few I would recommend studying: Dr Michael Gregor, Dr Joel Fuhrman, Brenda Davis RD, Dr Michael Klaper, Dr Neal Barnard, Dr Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr T Colin Campbell, Dr Alan Goldhamer and Dr. Joel Kahn.
Exploring image by Justin Luebke is public domain