Welcome to the Paddison Program Podcast!
This is the Paddison Program podcast for Optimal Health with Clint Paddison. Episode number one.
All right. It’s Clint here, episode one, thanks for tuning in. In this podcast series, I’m going to be talking all about how to achieve optimal health, how to work with autoimmune diseases, in particular rheumatoid arthritis, and how to treat them naturally both from a dietary point of view and from an exercise point of view on top of that also, from a mental point of view and also from a supplementation point of view.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Paddison Program where you learn how to improve your health from the inside out and now your host, Clint Paddison.
We’ve got sort of four angles to come at this and we also want to talk to other experts in the field. I want to bring to the podcast other people with expertise in certain areas. I anticipate being able to interview some people with great expertise with regards to gut disorders, other experts when it comes to optimal health and also I’m having to bring to the show some rheumatologists, some other naturopaths who I’m in contact with. I anticipate being able to answer a lot of questions that come back to me via the show notes and also by taking questions via e-mail and pretty much just answering and being a service to the rheumatoid arthritis community, and if that means you and if that means you’re struggling from rheumatoid arthritis or another autoimmune disease, then I hope that this podcast creates a great source of information for you in a way that you can take action to improve your health, keep your drugs at a minimum and your health at a maximum.
Who am I? Well, if you haven’t come across my work before, then let me give you a little bit of background, and then I want to share with you in this podcast my story. I want to give you a background of what I went through and all the struggles that I have been through and then tell you where I’m at now and what I do to help other people with RA.
Let’s get stuck into it. I am now 39 years old, and I got rheumatoid arthritis when I was 31, only a couple months after my 31st birthday. Actually, I tore my anterior cruciate ligament playing touch football here in Sydney, Australia the same week that I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I have had better weeks than that week. What happened is I tore my ACL playing touch football, I was all blown up and swollen in my knee and I was waiting on blood tests to come back from the GP because I had also that same week had sore feet.
I remember running up into the touch football field with sore feet thinking it’s nothing this will go away. The feet is where it began for me and then it moved into my fingers, into my wrists and eventually the disease even entered my chest and my jaw so that with every bite of food I would have pain and with every breath I would have pain. The diagnosis showed that I had very high levels of C reactive protein, my SED rate was high and my obviously physical exam showed that I had swelling in my fingers and my feet hurt at the time at the early stages it was just fingers and feet.
I went to the rheumatologist, the rheumatologists gave me the spiel you are going to be on drugs for the rest of your life. It’s about disease management, it’s not about trying to find a cure, it’s not about getting rid of this disease, it’s about how we can do our best to manage this situation. I actually at the time thought you know it can’t be that hard, I thought this isn’t going to be something that is as dire or as dramatic as what he’s talking about. I said look let me have a go on my own for 12 months or so and so the only drugs that he gave me on my first visit were some nonsteroidal anti-iflammatories. The particular brand was Voltaren and also a course of antibiotics. And I must say that the antibiotics definitely, even at this early stage of my understanding of things that are good and bad for the body, I thought to myself that doesn’t sound good. I was aware that I’d taken antibiotics for five years between the ages of around 16 to 21 for acne because my acne was very troublesome throughout my teenage years and I really wanted to get rid of the acne.
I took antibiotics, and I think it was Doxycycline, in fact I’m sure it was Doxycycline and this was the same antibiotic that was prescribed to me by the rheumatologist in my first visit. He said that some scientific studies had shown that there is a degree of benefit for some people about taking antibiotics for rheumatoid arthritis. This can be an entire podcast episode in the future because now I’ve learned so much about this disease and about the sort of fix or particular drugs and I have leaned what works and what doesn’t work with regards to these drug treatments.
I do believe to a large extent why this is the case, why some work and why some do not. I only took the antibiotics for a short period of time and then ceased those because a) they didn’t work, b) went against my intuition, and c) I really thought in the first 12 months that I might be able to get rid of this disease on my own. What I tried to do in the first 12 months is try and get rid of the disease naturally. Let me just a little bit of a footnote here about what happened with the Voltaren. I took the Voltaren, the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory for three weeks and let’s just say that I was steadily worsening with my IRA let’s say I was like a 3½ or 4 out of 10 of pain in the first sort of month and it was just each week that went by, I was just a little bit worse.
When I took the nonsteroidal drugs after literally the next day, I felt like I was just a miraculous case of perfection. I thought, okay, I’m fine, all I need to do is take these drugs, right? However, I noticed that over the following weeks that I needed more and more of that drug to keep my pain at bay. So just as my very first ever experiment with this particular disease, I thought what happens if I actually stop taking this drug? After three weeks of taking the nonsteroidal drug I stopped it cold turkey just to find out how I was and my pain had at least doubled in the three weeks that I had been taking the drug if not tripled. I was extremely bad. That’s when it entered into my chest, my jaw, of course it was in my knee because that’s where my ligament had been damaged, and as I was to learn that rheumatoid arthritis tends to seek the damaged parts of your body.
I then had my first insight into the damage that drugs can do and I was later to learn the exteme damage of nonsteroidal inflammatory drugs, that they can completely, dramatically increase the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and we can talk all about that in future episodes as well, which I intend to cover.
I did terribly in the first year, I tried lot of different supplements, nothing really gave me any kind of major pain relief. I was having elbow surgery after 18 months. I went back to the doctor and he put me on Methotrexate after my elbow, and I was on that and continued to explore and read about ways to heal my body naturally from this absolutely life debilitating dreaded horrible disease.
I continued to increase drugs and I eventually got to the maximum dose of 25 mgs per week of Methotrexate but I still couldn’t get my blood test results back to normal and I was trying to outsource this problem to every naturopath, homeopath, Chinese herbalists, homeopathy treatments that I was looking into. I remember sitting down at one particular meeting with a rheumatologist after I’d had the disease for about probably a couple of years, and he said we’re going to look at other drug options. We’re now on the maximum doze of Methotrexate, and I looked at my wife and I remember feeling like I’d completely let us down.
She’d married me when I’d only been having the early stages of the disease. Sorry I should say we got engaged at early stages of the disease and I know she was putting her faith in me as a husband and I’d felt like this was not the way to reward her with marrying me and I felt like I had failed her, I had failed myself and I actually felt like I had to do whatever it took in my whole existence to try and get well from this disease.
My particular background, I’m actually a research scientist. I have a Laser Physics degree, I published a scientific journal paper at the age of 23, I think it was, maybe 24. No, it was actually 22 or 23, and it was called the Simultaneous Fabrication of Multiple Optical Fiber Bragg Gratings using Frequency-Doubled Copper Vapor Lasers. That long title reflected the work that I had done at Macquarie University here in Sydney. What that reflected was a huge amount of research, abilities and skills that I had put together after four years of a laser physics degree and research that was awarded to me with all sorts of accolades with winning a New South Wales physics award, the Macquarie University science prize, the PAC award for my contributions to the science industry and also the highest award within the department of maths, physics, computing and electronics at my whole university for that year. Also the highest thesis grade that any thesis that had been submitted by an honor student had every been given, and I got the equal highest every that year with another student.
I thought to myself if I can do that well at university, why can’t I apply myself and try and work out what causes this disease? I said to the rheumatologist, let’s hold off on the other drugs, let’s keep me on this maximum dose of Methotrexate, and I’m going to go away and just continue to apply myself further with my investigations. He knew that I’d been working on this thus far and so he allowed me to go out and continue to explore my options which was a huge credit to him.
I then applied myself in the most incredible, most devoted possible way. I read every book I could on digestive health and nutrition and I was reading whole books on enzymes and learning everything I could as we all have done via the Internet. The first breakthrough however came from when I actually got food poisoning and during a bout of food poisoning, I vomited and had diarrhea for about 24 hours. Over 24 hour period I kept purging from both ends and throughout that delightful period of my life, I thought I was going to wake up the next day and have massive joint pain, because I’m sure you’ve found that whenever you stop moving your body, the joints tend to get worse. We intuitively know that if you don’t move the joints they worsen, right, or as I now say if you don’t move it, you lose it.
I thought that was going to happen to me, but miraculously, I woke up after 24 hours of not eating and just emptying my body I had zero joint inflammation and I mean nothing. I couldn’t believe it, I actually ran into the city to see my wife Melissa, and she was working a day job in the city. And I actually ran into the city which is about a 15 minute run and ran there and met her for lunch and said honey you can’t believe it. I hadn’t eaten for a day so I didn’t even care, I just wanted to get in there and show her how much my joints were now moving around.
We were both in complete disbelief and so this like totally changed my course of direction for how I was looking into this disease. Then I begun to put on my science hat again and I thought okay, what does it say in the scientific literature? I had published into a scientific journal paper before so I knew kind of how to look for the right scientific articles and I found the right websites and I started to research and do Google searches and also researches within the library of medical published journal papers myself.
I found a lot of scientific papers that showed a relationship between the digestive system and rheumatoid arthritis and a couple of them in particular really stood out for me. A group of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers were put on a water fast for a period of time and at the end of the water fast all of them had made tremendous improvements. I thought it wasn’t just me, other people with RA, when they go through a period of not eating they all also make incredible recoveries during that time. However like me, when that group of experimental subjects also ate again all their food came back. I thought how can I find what to eat while still keeping my pain at an absolute minimum? Then I started to experiment with all sorts of diets and after realizing that actually I couldn’t seem to eat anything without giving me dramatic pain. I read a book called the Enzyme Factor which I can reference to in the show notes that you can also order this book on Amazon, if you’re interested in reading a book that was instrumental in helping me make a lot of discoveries. It doesn’t talk much about RA but it is an interesting book.
I decided to eat foods with as much enzymes as possible and around about the same time, I’d been to a naturopath and this naturopath told me the importance of enzymes and he gave a very long history of his own journey towards health and how health became a naturopath and enzymes have played a very big part in his recovery. Of course he sold enzyme supplements which I spent hundreds of dollars on for a period of time until I worked out that you can get enzymes in abundance sources through foods.
I began to eat a raw food diet and I ate a raw food diet for eight months. It was extremely difficult. I followed this raw for diet and I managed to quite quickly maintain low pain levels. Over time I noticed that my pain levels actually went further down, let’s say my worst pain levels were a ten with consuming a raw food diet. I was probably able to get to a four or a five and maintain it at a four or a five. There are a lot of difficulties and challenges with a raw food diet and I can go into all those in a future episode, but it is the path that I took for about eight months and they were very hard eight months.
At the end of the eight months, I managed to get my blood test results back to normal and I was able to walk around reasonably well. I had to go to Bikram yoga every single day so that I could walk reasonably well. I had a very bad limp, but it continued me to be able to have movement around. Then after the raw food diet, I transitioned into some more cooked foods and the reason I wanted to do this is because I lost a ton of weight. I’ve always been a slim guy but with the raw food diet, I lost at least 12 kgs which is like 30 pounds. I didn’t really have a lot of weight to lose when I began that and so I just kept myself going through it thinking to myself that although I look really skinny, I’m feeling better and I’m going to prioritize the way I my joints feel over my external cosmetic appearance. That’s just a decision that I made.
At the end of the eight months, I moved onto some basic foods. The first food that I tried to eat that was cooked after the eight months was quinoa. It’s actually a pseudo grain. It’s certainly not a cereal grain which a lot of people have trouble with, with RA. It’s very easy to digest and it’s actually an alkalizing food. I ate quinoa and was able to eat quinoa a cooked food for the first time that previously, before the raw food diet, I was unable to eat without getting instant and major pain. Then I was able to consume also some buckwheat which is another pseudo grain and after eating some basic foods like buckwheat and quinoa and some sweet potato, I was living off that for probably another six to nine months so I was continuing on my raw food diet and then also being able to eat more and more higher percentages of the buckwheat, quinoa and sweet potato.
Meanwhile I was always having an enormous amount of leafy greens so I’m talking about like baby spinach, cos lettuce, bok choy, sometimes a little bit of silverbeet and just anything that was leafy and green I found was extremely healthy and healing for my body. I kept those up and also my green juices which is the celery and cucumber juice. I was doing this the whole time and I always found that the cucumber and celery juice was very, very beneficial at keeping my pain reduction at the minimum.
After a couple of months of the buckwheat and quinoa and the sweet potato I was able to introduce rice and I tried brown rice for a while and then later onto basmati rice. Then I was able to slowly reintroduce more and more plant based foods and I was able to reintroduce more fruits so I was able to concentrate on fruits that have a healing aspect such as papaya, oranges, cantaloupe or rockmelon as we say here in Australia. Eventually I was able to get to the point where I was off all my medication. It’s now been nearly four years since I have taken any drug at all for this disease. I have absolutely no pain whatsoever in my joints that comes from inflammation. I have no swelling, no inflammation at all. The joints that were affected by the rheumatoid arthritis some of them still have a little bit of clickiness and grindiness since the day of being damaged from the rheumatoid arthritis, however I have not got inflammation in my body and it’s been this way for years.
I didn’t use the word cure because I think that if I wanted to reestablish an autoimmune behavior in my body again, I could do that if I wanted to go out and eat cheese pizzas and eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. I do believe that I could reestablish that situation in my body or especially if I went and did long doses of antibiotics and ate a diet like that, I believe I can re-bring it on again. But I have absolute 100% conviction and confidence that this will never affect me ever again.
Some people that could be perceived as enormous skepticism, could be very skeptical to hear that information. I learned so well the relationship between foods and my body over such a long period of time as I said eight years I’ve been looking at this relationship. In the last four years since I’ve been off the drugs I’ve been helping people around the world now 55 countries, I’ve been helping people through our Paddison Program for Rheumatoid Arthritis.
As a result of helping people in 55 countries, I’ve responded to something, actually I will not quote the number of thousands of e-mails because I don’t have it in front of me but I can put that in the show notes where this episode can be posted on our website. I can say that in the correspondence with thousands of people with rheumatic arthritis I completely understand what are the major triggers, let’s say the major gross triggers for people with RA. The major gross triggers are foods that are high in fat, foods that contain excess protein than what the body needs. For a lot of people, it’s foods that are very high in simple sugars, processed foods. We also know that a lot of people have trouble with cereal grains so that’s the wheats, the barleys, these sort of foods and also one of the highest contributors to RA aggravation are meat products so that’s everything including fish.
So you might hear that list and think well, what is there left to eat? The overall sort of big reveal if you like or wondering where is the end result of this? Where do you want to get to eventually with your diet? Let me tell you first of all where I’m at. I eat right now an unrestricted high fat, high protein if I wish, plant based diet that is absolutely exquisite beyond belief. I have the most greatest food on my plate whenever I want to eat, sometimes it’s humble.
I have oatmeal for breakfast with honey and a glass of orange juice sometimes. The other times other foods are exquisite. We eat all sort of Indian foods at home, Mexican foods, we have a lot of food that is based on rice and I guess that you could say that our diet is some kind of a hybrid. I say ours meaning my wife and I, a hybrid between sort of a Chinese kind of a lot of things based on rice like an Asian rice based centric sort of approach to meals, but also very high in carbohydrates, things like potatoes and sweet potatoes. I can eat even wedges and all sorts of things like that. I have a very unrestricted plant based diet. The things that I do not eat and I will never eat ever again, meat and dairy products, and we can go into uncover why those foods are not just bad for rheumatoid arthritis but bad for health in general.
This may come as a shock or a surprise or it’s even offensive to some people and I’m not going to mince my words in this podcast series as I haven’t done on stage when I have delivered keynotes talks to naturopaths presented to pharmacists and have given talks in front of hundreds of people at the largest digestive health seminar conference that’s held in this country.
I want to tell it like it is and make sure that I get the message across and actually help you the listener of this podcast, help you reduce your rheumatic arthritis pain, increase your range or motion of your joints, increase the strength of the muscles around the joints that they actually develop their own ability to protect against the inflammation. To support you with your movement and your day to day activities. If it’s your wish to keep your drugs at a minimum. I am not an anti-drug message. I absolutely needed Methotrexate for a large period, for over I think it was a couple of years if I remember correctly, because without it, I wasn’t able to make any progress forward with my dietary experimentation and with my day to day life, I was debilitated.
I’m not anti-drugs, I am pro minimum drugs because these drugs as we’ll learn in future episodes and in great detail, not only have side effects that you can see, that you can feel whether it be fatigue, whether it be with other particular drugs that affect your eyesight, whether it be the side effects that destroy your liver or whether it be that it destroys your immune system or takes it to a minimum meaning that even the most expensive, almost the end result drugs can leave you susceptible to getting serious, serious other diseases that can be fatal.
The reason that people with rheumatoid arthritis have a shorter life expectancy is not because of the disease itself, it’s because of some of the treatments that are used to try and keep the disease at a minimum. I believe that these other treatments can be as damaging to your life as what the disease can be itself. If you’re with me on this journey then I welcome you to future episodes where I can get deep into the science behind a lot of the topics that I’ve covered in this particular first podcast. I’m going to on our very next podcast introduce you to someone else who has achieved the same result that I have just talked about.
This way I want to build some faith in you as hopefully an ongoing listener of this podcast series so that you can also build some hope back in your life. Even if your goal is to make small improvements to your health and just to get just a little bit more functionality in your life or whether your goal is to try and get off the medications all together and try and get this disease to an absolute minimum, then I think that I will be able to bring a lot to the plate having been through extraordinary levels of hell that I would never wish upon my worst enemy. I know that other people out there have been through what I’ve been through and for even longer periods of time.
On our next podcast, I’m going to interview someone whose had RA for more than 30 years and hear her story and what she’s been able to achieve in dramatically reducing the pain in her body and getting off all her medication. We’ll do that in episode two for now go and check out the show notes on this particular episode. All of these episodes are going to be posted to paddisonprogram.com, that’s paddisonprogram.com, and I’m going to link to that Enzyme book and I’m also going to link to a couple of talks that I have given that I mentioned earlier in this episode.
You can go and watch them and they cover in much more detail the science behind the way that I was able to heal myself and you can watch me give these presentations live including a TedX talk that I gave in the Gold Coast here in Australia. These videos are being seen by thousands of people online and you can go and watch these videos and then you can then come up to speed as quickly as possible on my philosophies, my beliefs and why I encourage a plant based diet that is again not just good for RA but is extraordinary for all other aspects of health and happy to answer any questions under the post of this episode.
Go to paddisonprogram.com and I’ll talk to you in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.
SHOW NOTES
Clint’s TEDx Talk:
Clint Paddison presenting at the International Convention of National Medicine
Dr Shinya’s book ‘The Enzyme Factor’ – http://www.amazon.com/The-Enzyme-Factor-Hiromi-Shinya/dp/0982290039
Paddison Program Community – https://www.paddisonprogram.com/store/paddison-program-for-rheumatoid-arthritis-community/