We discuss:
- The 2 non-negotiables for everyone following the Paddison Program
- The 5 ways of reducing pain.
- The most effective pain reduction methods
- Do you meet the criteria for drugs? This formula will make it clear.
MEMBER QUESTION – “Do you think I can heal my inflammatory arthritis without being on a drug? I am going back and forth on starting the methotrexate because I fear so much of causing damage while I figure all this out”.
CLINT – Okay, so this is one of this big kind of headline things almost like a chapter in my book this question. Do you need drugs to suppress your symptoms while you’re healing inflammatory arthritis? And so let me give you the big concepts here okay, and then you’ll need to apply that to your own situation and have a think about it. Because everyone’s situation is different with regards to how much compliance they have to the program, how much access they have to certain exercise, how much support they have from their family, there’s so many things going on here. But let’s talk about the big concepts of, do you need medications to reverse the inflammation in your body? All right. Let’s talk about this and methotrexate being the drug that you’re considering and looks like you’ve just gone back on.
Well I think that it’s fairly black and white, actually the concept of, do you or do you not need the medications? Let me get to why by starting with the 2 non-negotiable is that all of us should be applying to everything we’re doing. The first one is we do not want to be in high levels of pain. High levels of pain in the extremities of the body corresponds with an autoimmune disease to more leaky gut. So the inflammation in the joints triggers inflammation in the intestinal wall allowing more permeability, allowing more proteins into the blood, and causing more disease. So the science is real clear on that, and so we don’t want to be trying to battle this condition with high pain levels if they’re consistent month to month. Now if you’ve started the program, and your pain levels are high, and each month the pain levels are getting less or you’re seeing improvements that’s different. What I’m talking about is having them high all the time, and not showing improvement. Which brings us to the second crucial non-negotiable of everything that we’re doing here, is to not worsen month to month. We’re not allowed to allow ourselves to worsen month to month. This means if your C-Reactive Protein or SED Rate is going up or if your physical symptoms are seeming to get in the way from you month to month consistently that’s also not acceptable, that’s breaking a non-negotiable. So we’ve got to have low pain levels or getting closer to low pain levels fairly, steadily, and heading towards that, and we have to be showing that our symptoms are not creeping away from us month to month. Now if we can achieve those 2 non-negotiables’, now let’s talk about whether or not we need the medications.
So in parallel to meeting those 2 rules, we then have five ways of reducing pain. We have our diet, and exercise, we have stress reduction, and supplements, and we have medications, and that’s it. If we look at the cross section of options for us, and if you to include you know natural therapies like cannabis oil or curcumin things like that inside the supplements kind of an alternative therapy kind of category, then we’ve covered absolutely every way that there is to reduce pain. Now the most powerful ways to reduce pain are diet, medications. Medications being the most powerful, if you think of steroids for instance it’s very difficult to beat that artificial intervention. Exercise, supplements, and stress reduction in that order we might get medications, diet, exercise, supplements, stress reduction. So, of those 5 if you are doing the 4 that aren’t medications exactly the way that it’s described in our program, and you have maxed out each category to the point where you feel there’s not much else I can do. Then, if you aren’t hitting your non-negotiable’s then you have to have medications. So it’s that kind of formula, it’s just that formula.
Let me just summarize it then, if you’re basically eating the baseline diet of our program, so your diet is about as good as it can be as clean, and simple, and alkalizing, and rich in leafy greens as it can be, and you’re at nine out of 10 on your diet. And then your exercising every day, and cracking a sweat, and you’re supplementing some probiotics, and you got some digestive enzymes at work, you’re taking some potassium magnesium if you want to give those a try, and you’ve made sure that your vitamin D levels are really high, and that your B12 is being supplemented so it doesn’t become deficient, and you’ve reduced your workload so that you’re not stressed out all the time, you’ve got support around you so that you’re not trying to do this on your own which is stressful, and you’ve basically got sort of a feeling of adequate support and adequate time to apply to this. And yet your pain levels are still too high, or your pain is creeping away and you’re month to month, then you have to take the medications.
All right so that that formula right there, and therefore you don’t have to sort of worry about all these multiple variations, that’s all the factors that are at play. So I hope that that’s helpful because it’s taken me years to sort of work that out to explain it as sort of black and white as that, and hopefully that helps you. You can heal and methotrexate. I did three years on methotrexate, and my ability to eat foods without causing pain at the end of those three years was infinitely better than at the start.
So I believe that whilst it’s an old drug been around a very long time has some unpleasant side effects sure, but they all do. And so there’s no good drug in terms of happy go lucky take this get richer get pain reduction and no consequences. They all just have different consequences and I believe the consequences of methotrexate are in a category that doesn’t prevent us from healing, doesn’t mean that we don’t like them. But they’re not in the healing prevention category.