RA Drugs - Yes or No?
The answer is not whether you should or shouldn’t take RA drugs, but whether you have to or whether you don’t have to.
We don’t want to apply opinion on this, we want to apply quantitative data to decide whether or not you need to add drugs to your regimen or whether or not you don’t need to. So, let me give an example, there’s only 5 ways that you can lower pain. Now, those 5 ways are through:
But the majority - the biggest impact items are medications, diet and exercise.
So, if we focus on those 3 just for the purposes of this video because that’s like applying the Pareto Principle the 80 – 20 principle that where all the action happens. Now let’s look at the for and against of each one.
The benefits of going down the dietary path is that you can get results immediately. Just to give you an example, the extreme example is by not eating. If you don’t eat and you just do a celery and cucumber juice for 2 days, or you do a water fast for 2 days, about 19 out of 20 people (in my experience in reading the scientific literature) will get dramatic, extraordinary pain relief. And if they were to keep that up for a week would basically be completely pain free. Okay so, that’s the extreme version. And then a much lesser extreme version. If you to do something like the baseline phase of the Paddison Program then you would also get a dramatic and fast pain relief. Not as good as fasting but because fasting is unsustainable. But you would still get dramatic pain relief quickly without side effects and in fact huge other benefits like: reduce you risk of other chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease AND extend your life by 7 years on average by elimination meat and dairy products. So that’s one way, via diet.
The other 2 major ways that I mentioned, one of those is exercise. Now exercise acts like a giant pain killer, that’s what it is. It’s like a medication that you take every day, because you MUST exercise every day. And it will give you dramatic and fast pain reduction, I’m not talking about going for a walk. I’m talking about doing exercise at a level that really gets your heart rate up. A level that enables you to sweat. But it’s not the sweating itself that gives you the relief of symptoms, it’s not toxins leaving the body (although that may be a part of it). It is the whole experience of having the change of breathing, the movement through your joints, the elevated heart rate and the extra blood flow through your body. And a combination of the movement of your lymphatic system, the waste removal system. And all of these combined together to give you dramatic pain reduction, like a giant pain reduction pill or medication without side effects. And again, massive benefits like simply becoming fitter, improving your lymphatic system, eliminating toxins, eliminating wastes, and just feeling healthier. And I think that we don’t need to go into too much further detail about why exercise is a tremendous thing to do. As a broad statement, elevated heart rate, 30 minutes to 45 minutes a day during which the latter part of that you begin to sweat. And you have just done probably the equivalent of a 2 or 3 or a 4 mg dose of Prednisone or the equivalent of in terms of pain reduction. So that’s an absolute no brainer, right?
So, we’ve covered diet, we’ve covered exercise. Now, if you’re on the baseline phase of the Paddison Program For Rheumatoid Arthritis and you’re exercising daily in the way I’ve just described or doing something like Bikram Yoga which is my preferred and most highly recommended form of exercise for people with inflammatory arthritis. And you’re doing those things, and your C-Reactive Protein and your SED Rate are still elevated after a couple of months. Then there’s not a lot of wriggle-room left, and some medications are going to be required to mop up that additional inflammation and bring your inflammation levels back in to the normal range in your blood test. And also, make sure that your physical symptoms are clear as well. Because it’s a non-negotiable that we want to have very low inflammation levels or minimal to zero inflammation levels in our body.
It shouldn’t be "should I go on drugs, should I not go on drugs?". It should be "Does the ultimate dietary program, plus the ultimate approach with your exercise get you far enough?" And if it does not, the yes you need to take some medications.
The common approach is to put people immediately on medications immediately after diagnosis. Of course, this can have some very fast reduction in pain most of the time. Especially something like Prednisone, but the side effects are massive. And so, for me, my approach to these things is to get everything perfect that we can control naturally, and then treat what’s left over control artificially.
So that’s my view on the medications. On whether or not one should or shouldn’t, it’s about whether or not you need to, or you don’t need to. If you’re on a lot of medications already and you are halfheartedly doing Paddison Program, and maybe you’re doing a little bit of exercise, and your blood work is not ideal. Then the answer in my opinion is not to look at more drugs, it’s to get the first two right. And then once they are right, see whether or not you need to add more medications to the mix. That would be my personal opinion.
So, I hope that’s cleared things up with regards to medications and their necessity. I would always look to try and perfect the diet, perfect the exercise, before adding the additional meds. Because the first two, not only come with no side effects but come with limitless other health benefits.
