STRONGER THAN STEROIDS:
NEW SOLUTIONS FOR BEATING ARTHRITIS

1. The surprising truth about hidden food sensitivities

As unbelievable as it may sound, a great deal of your arthritis pain could be the result of your dietary choices. The chances are very high that several of the foods you eat on a regular daily basis are “trigger” foods that cause subtle—but serious—immunological reactions in your white blood cells.

Hours or even days after eating those trigger foods, you may experience fatigue, headaches, digestive problems, insomnia, skin breakouts, and joint pain—but you may never connect those symptoms to the foods that caused them. This is a phenomenon known as hidden food sensitivity—and it affects up to 70 percent of the population.

How does a food allergy lead to arthritis?
When you have a sensitivity to a certain food, your body is unable to completely digest and process the nutrients it contains. As a result, incompletely digested food particles pass through the digestive-tract walls and into your bloodstream. They are eventually deposited in tissue, where the white blood cells mistake them for foreign bodies. The immune system then mounts an attack, just as it would against a virus, bacteria, or even a cancer cell. Your system is flooded with histamines, prostaglandins, and other immune chemicals. These chemicals are extremely irritating to your tissues, causing pain and inflammation. (This is also why a bout with the flu leaves you so stiff and sore.) If the condition is left untreated, permanent damage to the joint tissue can occur.

Eliminating your sensitivities
It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to identify your trigger foods by simply observing your reactions to the foods you eat, since symptoms can occur within hours or even days after you eat the food. Symptoms can also drag on for up to four days, making it even harder to pinpoint the source. Conventional food-allergy tests, such as a skin prick, are also of limited value. One session of skin prick testing usually targets 20 to 40 possible allergens at a cost of about $4 apiece. For a thorough evaluation of a hundred or more possible allergens, you’ll pay at least $400, and that doesn’t include the cost of multiple office visits.

More importantly, these types of tests can only detect a full-blown antibody response to a substance— they cannot detect the subtle immune-cell responses typical of hidden food sensitivities. But there are better, more accurate tools to pinpoint thesource of the problem.

Sophisticated blood tests like the ALCAT test can identify much more than just the antibodies in your blood. In the laboratory, the ALCAT test mimics what happens to the blood cells when a food or other substance is actually ingested—detecting specific, subtle changes in your white blood cells that indicate sensitivity.

Eliminating these foods from your diet will dramatically reduce symptoms within one week. However, by following a couple of simple guidelines, you should eventually be able to resume eating a full range of all of your favorite foods without inciting the inflammatory process that contributes to arthritis. Complete instructions are provided with the results of the ALCAT test. You can order an ALCAT test yourself by calling the lab directly.

2. Mycoplasmas: tiny microorganisms that could be causing your arthritis

Your doctor probably hasn’t heard about the connection between mycoplasmal infections and arthritis. But if you are struggling with arthritis, you can benefit from this important discovery today.

Mycoplasmas are tiny microorganisms, even smaller than bacteria. They are commonly found in the saliva and mucous membranes of the mouth or nose, and they were once dismissed as relatively harmless organisms. However, we now know that
mycoplasmas can also penetrate into your blood cells, where they are far from harmless. Your painful joints could be caused by a systemic infection of this tiny microorganism. Researchers have made the surprising discovery that mycoplasmal infections occur in approximately half of the patients with certain chronic diseases—including arthritis.

How to get tested

Although it’s relatively simple to test for mycoplasmas on mucosal surfaces like the mouth, once they get inside of cells, conventional antibody tests are usually useless, and they are extremely difficult to culture. Fortunately, a newly developed and specialized test, called a forensic PCR-DNA, is able to detect fragments of mycoplasmas inside the white blood cells. The white blood cells scavenge those pieces as they clean up debris in the tissues and blood. If the DNA of a mycoplasma is found in your white blood cells, an active infection exists. PCR-DNA tests are available through labs listed in the Member Source Directory.

A natural approach
So what can you do if you test positive for a mycoplasmal infection? Darryl See, M.D., has been treating patients with such infections for several years at the Center for Special Immunology and also at the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia
Clinic at UC Irvine, which he co-directs. In his own practice, Dr. See has observed that patients’ PCR-DNA tests can turn from positive to negative with the use of colloidal silver. However, he stresses that not all colloidal-silver products are the same. The colloidal silver used by Dr. See contains three to five parts silver per million, and the particles of silver are dissolved to the tiny molecular size of 2 to 5 nanometers. It appears that the smaller size is more effective against mycoplasmas than are the more common colloidal silvers with particles ranging from 50 to 100 ppm (parts per million). And since less silver is consumed on a daily basis, toxicity is rare.

You can also use selenium and oxygen supplements to combat a mycoplasmal infection. A recommended dose of 200 to 400 micrograms of selenium as a dietary supplement has been shown to arrest the growth of the invaders. Also, because mycoplasmas prefer an environment low in oxygen, providing extra oxygen through magnesium-peroxide supplements will inhibit their growth.
The research on the mycoplasma/arthritis connection has just begun—but it’s already clear that these mysterious creatures play an important role in arthritis. If mycoplasmas are attacking your joints, eliminating them from your system may help you beat arthritis for good. For more information on PCR-DNA testing, colloidal silver, and magnesium peroxide supplements.