A new treatment for arthritis: Vagus-nerve stimulation
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
One day I learned about modifying my diet to avoid inflammation. I greatly limited, but did not entirely eliminate, tomatoes and potatoes in my diet.
The effects were literally life changing. I no longer hobble each morning. If someone you know is suffering from arthritis I can highly recommend conducting this experiment for a few months.
This just isn't true. A GP (General Practitioner) sees a lot of patients. The only realistic reason you can get seen by a GP in good time is because they tend to leave some slots open for more urgent things: The reason you can't get in to see a specialist on the same day (usually) is because they don't.
Specialists get paid more because they specialize: They won't know as much about curing everyday ills and they gave up on that when they specialized. Medicine is complex, and it only makes sense to have folks specialize in some things (like bones and neurology and whatnot).
We see the same thing with other professions, though not all pay more for different things. Knowing how to run an industrial kitchen (factory, large cafeterias, etc) is different from fast food, for example. Folks with knowledge of specialized systems get paid more, in general: This is your medical specialist.
Yes they see "urgent" patients that happen to be painfully sick (otitis for instance) and they need to give them well know and predictable medicine (and other such "urgencies" - which I put in quotes not because they are not urgent, but because they are expected and everyday business. If you had an otitis you will know that the pain is unbearable and that you either have to see the MD quick, lose your mind of have your eardrum break).
These GPs will push you towards a specialist in case they detect something abnormal because they do not have the current knowledge to treat you correctly.
For the record - one of my best friends is a GP and their work is terrific. They are a mixture of science, magic voodoo and psychologists to actually manage the everyday health of the whole society. I truly regard them highly.
Also, the amount of hours they do is insane - way too much in my opinion and yet it is so difficult to get an appointment. They are on a strike today, the first as long as I can remember to get their regulated fee to be raised.
Ruling out peppers, eggplants and tomatoes isn't fun, but it isn't even close to impossible. Imagine having immune responses to corn! Maybe it won't work, but it only takes about a month to evaluate.
My wife naturally rarely eats nightshades and consumption has zero correlation with inflammation or RA. If it were as simple as not eating tomatoes everyone would be cured. Instead every person that deals with that who goes to specialists regularly, who deals with the negative side effects of the drugs that actually reduce inflammation and keep your insides and joints from being destroyed has heard countless fake cures.
Those who care, do real continuing education - often on their own time and without asking for official credit.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUOlmI-naFs
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=osteoarthritis+inflamm...
Another one, although it is a bit harder to source at the right price, is water. Once you recognize the signs of sudden-onset inflammation, however subtle, when you remove and then try the above foods, it is worth seeing if you are having the same reaction to your water -- in my case, it changed me from a chronically dehydrated person who had to prep his day's water next to him to force himself to drink to someone who will literally get up and go across town to fetch more if there isn't enough in the house without it even feeling like it's taking effort or motivation.
It makes a huge difference to your mental clarity, as well.
> Nightshade Vegetables
> Eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes are all members of the nightshade family. These vegetables contain the chemical solanine, which some people claim aggravates arthritis pain and inflammation. However, most reports are anecdotal, and while it certainly might be true for some people, there are no scientific studies done to prove that they actually cause inflammation or make symptoms worse, says Kim Larson, a Seattle-based dietitian and Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Spokesperson.
https://www.arthritis.org/health-wellness/healthy-living/nut...
Christmas is one of those times where the bathtub is likely flooded. Peak commerce. Rushing to hit year end deadlines. Squeezing in medical appointments before deductibles reset. Dangerous winter conditions, but also everyone is traveling at the same time. Rampant spread of diseases. Massive amounts of food, especially sugars. Low sunlight. Family drama. Irregular schedule. Financial stress. I could go on.
If one doesn’t take care to do that things that make the bathtub drain faster (nutrition, activity, rest, water…) you risk big inflammation and internal scarring.
This year I asked my family: does anyone actually like surprises? There was unanimous agreement that we all hate it. This allowed some novel flexibility. I started giving gifts in early December, and only had a few on the official day. All of the sizes were figured out, returns processed, and cardboard broken down over 2 weeks. We ended up having 3 quiet Christmas parties with small family groups over 4 days. It was more manageable than the usual tornado. I’ve maintained my standard sleep schedule. It was still all a bit overwhelming, especially for my neurodivergent ass having to socialize 500% more than usual. My bathtub is getting pretty full. So I’m going to go take a bath :)
If this treatment could be turned into a drug that had billions of dollars in revenue, as some arthritis drugs have, then there would be endless studies.
Sadly, that's not the world we live in.
"Lack of studies" in many cases is code for "there's no money to be made here."
This is too bad, because many extremely effective and effectively free treatments are ignored by scientists because they can't fund the research.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. It's entirely possible nobody has studied it yet.
It's also worth pointing out that drug companies have no incentive to research subtractive diets. They want to find additive treatments that keep symptoms at bay.
maybe i'm a bad reader but i believe that's what the person you're replying to is saying
Should there be more? Of course! But the money has to come from somewhere. For a study on potatoes and inflammation it has to come from the taxpayer or a non-profit institute. For a study on a new drug that has a potential to make a huge profit, of course it's much easier to find someone besides those to fund it. There are many problems with the modern medical system but I don't think this aspect is totally broken, definitely not to the degree that nay sayers would have you believe.
In what world do we not see an alignment of interests for studies from nutritionists and dieticians on this topic?
We have a LOT of studies on low fodmap diets and their health effects.
First things first: Don't you think that if we had better drugs for whatever you have, that we wouldn't go with that in general? (I know there are exceptions that say that we wouldn't, but these are exceptions).
Second: 25% effective is better than nothing. I have MS. The first real drugs - all injections with plenty of side effects - were around 33% effective or something like that and might have reduced severity of the stuff it didn't stop. This wasn't after 2 years, this was the out-of-the-box effectiveness.
And it was still worth it. This is because an imperfect solution is better than no solution whatsoever. Know what happens in MS when you have fewer flares? You have less risk of permanent damage. It meant your risk of bad events is less. You have less chance of not being able to walk or not controlling your bowels or having full vision.
The drugs were imperfect because our knowledge was (and is) imperfect. That was the best we had at the time. But then again, it was the foundation for modern drugs which are more effective (and easier to take than an at-home injection). Cost is still an issue, but single-payer systems still pay for them because the overall cost is less than the cost of unchecked disease.
Most, if not all of the diets advertised for MS have not proven themselves, despite the claims of the folks writing the books (most of which have had other interventions and might have just been lucky with their disease progression, like I have been so far).
TLDR: An imperfect drug that helps a little is better than no help at all.
In his case there is an alternative. It will never be promoted.
You can limit stress and find many practices and supplements which reduce anxiety and cortisol.
I'll pretend this insult wasn't here.
>Governments that provide and purchase healthcare services are also in the business of funding research.
Well, some research, but the $100M+ cost of studies to get anything approved as a medication is exclusive done by companies hoping to profit from selling it, AFAIK.
One effect of this system is that no one funds such studies for non patentable substances.
https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/pubmed/Nightshade%20and%...
As an anecdote, I know someone who had rosacea breakout and ended up eliminating tomatoes in particular from her diet and it seemed to do the trick so there should be something in tomatoes that causes inflammation...
Chronic inflammation is not beneficial.
You are conflating the two
When you tear a muscle or a tendon, inflammation helps blood to flow into the affected areas, speeding up the healing process.
Inflammation is one of the tools your immune system has to keep you in good health. Too much of it can have bad side-effects though, which is why we need to keep it under control.
Nightshades are tolerated by people with healthy guts and there is a smaller set of people with a gut dysfunction that means the solanine (alkaloids) in nightshades causes leaky gut syndrome leading to the inflammation you are talking about.
Curcumin (turmeric) does alleviate this inflammation pretty powerfully, at least on a temporary basis
We absolutely know for a fact that some people can have dysfunction of the tight junctions which make up the lining of the intestines. We don't know too much about it, but the idea that bacteria and endotoxins can pass through the gut wall and into the bloodstream is established fact at this point. "Endotoxin" has the sound of a pseudoscientific word, but it simply refers to the lipopolysaccharides that bacteria use to build their outer membranes.
People with some autoimmune diseases have been found to have circulating endotoxins and other bacterial byproducts in their peripheral blood, though the process (bacterial translocation) and the mechanism by which these affect the body are both poorly understood. There's been very little research into what processes can cause intestinal permeability and gut dysbiosis in autoimmune patients. For example, it's unclear if it's the cause of the autoimmunity (permeability leading to SIBO-like bacterial overload leading to an aberrant immune response), or if the autoimmune disease causes it (systemic inflammation leading to permeability).
I've not seen any peer reviewed evidence about nightshades or glycoalkaloids. There's some research on curcumin and quercetin that's interesting.
This seems like oversubtle reasoning that cruelly dismisses legitimate suffering from an actual disease process.
You seem to admit there's a convincing scientific basis.
Leaky gut syndrome is pseudoscience but intestinal permeability is real? Ok. It seems like medical science isn't advanced enough to sort out most gut disease, it manifests in somewhat strange and seemingly mysterious ways, and people suffering are left to discuss amongst themselves online in order to find some relief after being shrugged away by doctors (or worse hurt by inappropriate medical procedures/medicines like antibiotics, etc.).
So instead of just condescendingly labelling them anti-science whackos ("pseudoscience"), perhaps we should be compassionate and recognize the condition?
I agree there is a lot of just blatant nonsense and maybe they do misuse leaky gut but I think the medical community has a habit of vilifying people who are suffering real problems. I can't tell you how many times I've had a real medical issue (be it a bacterial infection, virus, or most recently, gut dysbiosis) and my doctor blames it on anxiety and offers me lexapro.
For dosing curcumin, you can try juicing a quarter inch of turmeric root a day and starting there, I have seen that knock out a lot of things within a short number of days
That's why he didn't call it a meta-analysis but instead said "It’s more of a meta analysis in my mind of all the different studies and anecdotes I’ve osmoted over the years"
It'd be one thing if he said all those things as some sort of scientific fact, but he very clearly qualified his statements as hypothetical conclusions informed by surveying literature, reading developments and other things.
By saying "I'm not trying to be cruel" you seem to be at least aware that you're being pretty censorious. It seems misplaced to me.
(Will now go and look for the comment and edit here if I find it)
I like that one and it has good references. I could find more (Crisco and trans fats... duh) but I mean come on...
Seed oils like canola oil are manufactured and did not exist before 1900. They're totally unnatural and heavily manufactured with solvents, preservatives, high heats, deadorizers, coloring. Seed oils go rancid so fast without chemical processing and preservatives before they're bottled.
Do you want to cook with stable saturated fats in ghee that has been used for generations after generations - Or manufactured seed oil, first sold to the public as Crisco by P&G? Seed oils do not occur in nature, they are manufactured. Do you want to shove it down your gut until good enough studies prove it's safe or unsafe? Not me!
Vegetable oils. Good history here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uqj35nHB0g&t=749s This doctor looks into numerous studies in this lecture, but fats and seed oils are covered from 749s as linked and the next ~25 minutes. Its part 1 of 3 lectures. Highly recommend
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
There are also some molecular pathways that might be triggered by substances in plant oils but there's not much systemic research into this yet.
But I think it's all plausible. There's really no harm in restricting yourself to just olive oil out of all extracted plant oils. And since it cuts out most processed foods available on the market it might help you in other ways.
You can still eat plant oils with the whole plants they come from becuse you won't be able to eat even remotely close quantities of them this way.
Plant oils are not inherently safe. Canola oil for example is just rapeseed oil extracted out of plant variety that contain as little as possible of the poison that makes rapeseed oil not safe for human consumption.
The fact that we were able to breed the plant that doesn't immediatelly kill us doesn't mean it's fully safe to eat.
In other words, this is vaporware as yet.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...
I bought the equipment to try this myself (basically a TENS device and some electrodes), but have been too afraid to apply it :/
So be careful trying this stuff at home!
Cue the obligatory scene (42 seconds) from "Strange Brew" [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/embed/EojzfxXGxtE?start=4064&end=410...
Meditation, Massage, Exercise, Music and Cold-Water immersion can do that, too: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/vagus-nerve-stimulation/