The most valuable information you can provide to your doctor on an initial visit is your clinical history. Usually the doctor will ask you to describe your symptoms and then will ask you specific questions about your symptoms, such as:
- Which joints are painful or stiff?
- When is the pain or stiffness worse?
- What makes the symptoms better or worse?
- How long does the morning stiffness last?
- Do you feel tired much of the time?
Providing your physician with complete and accurate answers to these questions is one of the most important roles you can play in your own medical care. This is because the physician depends on an analysis of the clinical history to help identify the cause of your joint problems.
It’s a good idea to prepare a written record of your symptoms as they occur. You can draw up a list of symptoms, including where you feel pain or stiffness or swelling and the time of day when it occurs or when it is the most bothersome; take this list with you to the doctor’s office. This list will help you answer your doctor’s questions accurately because you will have a written record of what you have been experiencing before your visit. Not everyone can remember exactly when pain or stiffness or swelling was first experienced or pinpoint the onset of changes in ability to I perform a given task. Once you become aware of these changes, however, it is a good idea to keep a record of them.
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Archive for the ‘Arthritis’ Category
After you have been diagnosed with RA you will wonder what course or natural history your arthritis will follow. Will it continue in the same way it started, or will additional, or different, joints become involved in time? The answers to these questions are as different as the persons asking them. In some cases, indeed, the way arthritis starts allows physicians to predict the course it will follow, but this is not true in every ease.
The following four general courses that RA can follow were described before current treatments (or therapeutic strategies) had been developed, and therefore they reflect the untreated natural histories of RA. Keep in mind that what follows are four potential courses of untreated RA. The actual course of any given individual’s RA may vary from any of these four courses.
1. Spontaneous remission. The person who develops signs and symptoms of RA and then, with little or no medication (generally only non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications, called NSAIDs), becomes symptom-free, is said to have gone into spontaneous remission. Remission may be described as a period of time during which there is no evidence of active disease or illness, in this case, RA.
During remission from RA, blood tests, such as the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, often produce normal results. Generally it is estimated that 20 percent of all RA patients will have a spontaneous remission, but more than 50 percent of these will have a recurrence of RA in the future. Thus, in reality, probably only 5 to 10 percent of untreated patients have a permanent remission. The majority of people with RA require continued treatment.
Patients and physicians often wonder how long they should wait for this potential spontaneous remission before starting stronger medications designed to bring on a medically induced remission (these medications are called DMARDs, or disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs). The optimal period to start DMARDs varies from case to case, but most rheumatologists would begin if there was any evidence of impending joint damage and certainly if joint damage was visible on x-ray films. This is particularly important since it is now generally believed that these drugs are most effective if taken early in the course of arthritis.
2. Remitting. Some people with RA have a series of flare-ups of arthritis followed by a return to normal health between attacks. A person who has remitting arthritis may not need remission-inducing medications if there is no ongoing joint damage and if joint function returns to normal between flare-ups. The attacks themselves, when the arthritis is active, are commonly treated with NSAIDs. Attacks that occur very frequently or that are very lengthy may begin to affect the person’s life-style, and then the person with RA and the physician may decide that DMARDs should be taken.
3. Remitting progressive. The third possible course of RA is one in which the person experiences a pattern of flare-ups without a return to normal health between attacks. Joint damage over time is a distinct possibility in this course of RA because some inflammation remains in the joints between attacks. In this case, DMARD therapy ought to be a serious consideration.
4. Progressive. In this course, the person experiences a gradual increase in pain, swelling, and joint damage over time. Usually this progression occurs very slowly, but some people experience a rapid loss of function. Early treatment with DMARD therapy in an effort to halt progression of arthritis is recommended.
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This “simple” and cheap remedy is used more than any other drug by millions of arthritis sufferers. The main reasons for this are: (a) aspirin is inexpensive; (b) it is easily available without prescription; (c) it is generally believed that aspirin is completely nonhabitual and harmless; and (d) it eases pain and makes the patient feel more comfortable.
Because of the above reasons aspirin is so extensively used that it is a perennial remedy and a habitual routine of virtually all arthritic patients. They use it in progressively increasing amounts and many become so dependent on aspirin that they can hardly live without the drug. Arthritics must account for a big portion of the 18 million pounds of aspirin sold in the United States yearly. Over 15 tons of aspirin is consumed every 24 hours!
I wish people were better informed about how much damage this “harmless” drug can cause.
There is a general agreement among medical practitioners that aspirin is a toxic substance which has many alarming side effects.
Technically known as acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin—and many other patented drugs which feature aspirin as a main ingredient—can cause severe poisoning and result in pathological changes in the brain, liver, and kidneys.
Used over a long period of time aspirin may depress the production rate of the immune bodies of the organism and thus undermine the body’s own healing powers. By masking symptoms of the acute stages of arthritis, it leads the patient to a false sense of security and actually contributes to conversion of the disease to a chronic stage.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has reported that even small doses of aspirin can cause cardiac weakness with excessive pulse rate, edematous swelling of the mucous membranes, irregular pulse, and occasionally albuminuria (albumin in urine) .
Other toxic effects of aspirin are a tendency to bleed and delirium or a state of incoherency, restlessness, and confusion.
Aspirin is also known as a vitamin antagonist. It is especially antagonistic towards vitamin C and destroys huge quantities of it in the body.
This should be enough to make it clear that aspirin is far from a harmless little friend of the arthritic, as it is pictured by advertisers. Since it can cause many serious side effects and its only “good” property is in masking the symptoms, it should be evident to everyone that this remedy should not be used if the arthritis sufferer is looking for a real betterment of his condition.
The public health authorities are beginning to realize the danger of the indiscriminate use of aspirin. At a recent Surgeon General’s Workshop on Prevention of Disability from Arthritis a suggestion was made “to attempt to curtail the advertising claims of salicylate derivatives so commonly heard on radio and television.” It was, however, agreed that such an action should come from the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Deceptive Practices.
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CETYLMYRISTOLEATE: At room temperature cetylmyristoleate is a liquid wax. It can be digested only in the alkaline environment of the small intestine. Cetylmyristoleate is a large molecule. These molecules have a strong affinity for each other and tend to clump together in large impenetrable masses. This results in a very small surface area relative to its weight and volume. Only the surfaces are exposed to the digestive process. Since that is only a very small percentage of the whole, very little gets digested, giving unaltered cetylmyristoleate a very low level of bioavailability. This is true of virtually all waxes. Faecal analysis indicates that they pass through the digestive system virtually undigested.
CMO: To get an efficient and effective orally administered product, it was essential to raise the digestibility and resultant bioavailability of cetylmyristoleate. Consequently, we had to develop proprietary pharmaceutical processing methods that employ cerasomal technology. The resulting product, now a waxy solid rather than a liquid, was appropriately named
cerasomal-cis-9-cetylmyristoleate, and trademarked as CMO.
There is a very important difference between the liquid form and the solid form. As a solid, CMO now resembles a crystalline structure that shatters in the alkaline confines of the small intestine. These shattered particles form a netlike mesh with enormous surface areas, allowing immensely greater digestive efficiency. Furthermore, the reticulated cleavage faces range between 0.9 and 1.0 microns in diameter, which accesses biological uptake mechanisms not available to either larger or smaller particles. Research shows that the body is 40 to 200 times more receptive to particles of this size. This is what makes CMO much more bioavailable and effective than other products. And it is our exclusive proprietary processing methods that make it so.
CETYLMYRISTATE: It’s pathetic that we even have to bother with this one. Myristate, as opposed to myristoleate, has virtually no immunomodulatory properties. Thus, it has essentially no effect on arthritis or any other autoimmune disease. The best that promoters of these products (often as cheap as $3.00-$4.00 a bottle wholesale) can come up with to describe their stuff is something like “a free floating myristate.” Nobody here can figure out what that means. And the producers won’t clarify. If you can figure it out, please clue us in.
A NOTE ON “VEGETABLE” SOURCES: Edible Oil and Fat Products, clearly lists only four sources for myristoleic acid, the substance needed to produce any form of myristoleate, including cetylmyristoleate. Those sources are beef tallow, butterfat, chicken fat, and sheep tallow. Period! Its extensive listings clearly show that there are NO VEGETABLE SOURCES, not even coconut or soybean oil as some have tried to claim. Any claim that cetylmyristoleate can come from a vegetable source is fraudulent.
A CAUTION ABOUT SYNTHETIC PRODUCTS: Synthetically produced cetylmyristoleate contains a large amount, probably 50%, of trans type cetylmyristoleate. The trans type molecule is unnatural to the body and causes physical damage by disrupting cellular membranes. Even in some so-called “natural” products there remains a trace of toxic residue left from harsh processing. Because it is a completely natural product, CMO has absolutely no trans molecules, and there is no toxic residue because no toxic substances are used in any stage of its processing.
We hope this helps you understand the difference between products, and that there is only one genuine and effective CMO.
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